Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Kurdish issue

In 2009, Prime Minister Erdoğan's government announced a plan to help end the quarter-century-long Turkey–Kurdistan Workers' Party conflict that had cost more than 40,000 lives. The government's plan, supported by the European Union, intended to allow the Kurdish language to be used in all broadcast media and political campaigns, and restored Kurdish names to cities and towns that had been given Turkish ones. Erdoğan said, "We took a courageous step to resolve chronic issues that constitute an obstacle along Turkey's development, progression and empowerment." Erdoğan passed a partial amnesty to reduce penalties faced by many members of the Kurdish guerrilla movement PKK who had surrendered to the government. On 23 November 2011, during a televised meeting of his party in Ankara, he apologized on behalf of the state for the Dersim massacre, where many Alevis and Zazas were killed. In 2013 the government of Erdoğan began a peace process between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish Government, mediated by parliamentarians of the Peoples' Democratic party (HDP).

In 2015, following AKP electoral defeat, the rise of a social democrat, pro-Kurdish rights opposition party, and the minor Ceylanpınar incident, he decided that the peace process was over and supported the revocation of the parliamentary immunity of the HDP parliamentarians. Violent confrontation resumed in 2015–2017, mainly in the South East of Turkey, resulting in higher death tolls and several external operations on the part of the Turkish military. Representatives and elected HDP have been systematically arrested, removed, and replaced in their offices, this tendency being confirmed after the 2016 Turkish coup attempt and the following purges. Six thousand additional deaths occurred in Turkey alone for 2015–2022. Yet, as of 2022 the intensity of the PKK-Turkey conflict did decrease in recent years. In the previous decade, Erdogan and the AKP government used anti-PKK, martial rhetoric and external operations to raise Turkish nationalist votes before elections.
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