Repression and Displacement of Kurds in Turkey

Repression and Displacement of Kurds in Turkey is presented as a major example of state violence sustained by U.S. arms and muted in public discussion. The account describes a counteroffensive in southeastern Turkey that killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and destroyed thousands of villages, while later being invoked as evidence of a persistent double standard in the language and practice of counterterrorism.

U.S. Support and the Counteroffensive

In the 1990s, the United States supplied Turkey with 80 percent of the weapons used in its counteroffensive against Kurds in the country’s southeast. The account links that assistance to an intensification of the campaign and characterizes the resulting abuses as among the decade’s worst episodes of ethnic cleansing and destruction. It argues that the scale and severity of the violence were scarcely known in part because the United States bore substantial responsibility for it.

Arms transfers followed a marked chronology. The quantity of U.S. weapons rose sharply in 1984, as Turkey began its attacks, and did not fall back to its previous level until 1999, after the campaign’s stated objectives had been achieved. This sequence gives the policy relationship a concrete shape: support did not merely accompany the violence in the account’s telling, but expanded as the counteroffensive began and persisted through the years in which it was carried out.

Human Cost and Displacement

The account records tens of thousands of people killed, between two and three million driven from their homes, and 3,500 villages destroyed. It compares the number of destroyed villages with Kosovo, stating that Turkey’s total was seven times greater than the number destroyed under NATO bombing there. These figures make displacement and the destruction of communities central to the episode, rather than incidental consequences of a military campaign.

The consequences were also invoked in later discussion of Turkey’s role in the “war on terror.” The Turkish prime minister described his country as having a special debt of gratitude to the United States, which had supported Ankara’s fight against terrorism. Chomsky connects that claim to the earlier campaign and its human costs, setting Turkey’s presentation as a U.S. partner against terrorism against the record of violence and mass displacement carried out with extensive American military support.

Public Framing and Political Significance

The episode figures in a broader critique of how political labels distinguish violence by powerful states from violence by their adversaries. The account argues that U.S. support for Turkey’s campaign was largely overlooked, while any mention of it could be dismissed as an isolated discordant note in a general commitment to ending inhumanity. That contrast—between the scale of the reported consequences and the limited attention paid to them—is part of the episode’s significance in the book.

The campaign also exposes a tension in the later language of counterterrorism. Turkey could be praised by Washington for joining the campaign against terror even as the earlier U.S.-supported operations against Kurds were described as state terror and ethnic cleansing. The account uses this juxtaposition to challenge the idea that terrorism is defined and condemned consistently, regardless of who uses violence or which government supplies the means.