The brutalization of Turkish society by the Turkish security forces for most of modern Turkey's life, and particularly since the military coup of 1980, has inevitably resulted in an internal crisis of governance and the lack of a civic mentality. However, it is wrong to lay all the blame for the crisis that came to a head in Istanbul’s Gezi Park at Prime Ministers Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s doorstep.

The recent demonstrations offer an opportunity to address police brutality in Turkey, in particular the legacy of the country’s three-decade war in the southeast, where the same police force that fired tear and pepper gas at protesters in Gezi Park honed its ruthless response to dissent on the country’s Kurdish minority.

Despite their ideological differences, successive regimes in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria have since the early 20th century agreed on one thing: the oppression of Kurdish minorities in the Middle East. But it now seems the brutalization of these societies by security forces is backfiring. While the Arab parts of Iraq are being torn apart in a sectarian power struggle, the Kurdish region is prospering. In Syria, where civil war has reduced much of the country to rubble, the Kurdish people have stayed on the sidelines and their region remains relatively safe. In Iran, while Tehran and other large cities churned in the aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections, the Kurdish areas stayed calm. And as Turkish police fired up to 130,000 tear-gas canisters against protesters in Istanbul and Ankara, with plans to buy a further 100,000, the Kurdish areas in the southeast of the country have seldom been so quiet.

For more than 30 years, the Turkish state used the army and police to oppress Kurds demanding recognition of their basic rights. In fact, denial has been a hallmark of successive Turkish governments since the day Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the republic in 1923 and promptly removed every official reference to the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and banned the media from using those terms. When, for instance, the Kurds of Dersim challenged the state in 1937, Ataturk sent in troops, including his adoptive fighter-pilot daughter, resulting in the deaths of around 40,000 Kurds. Other parties that came to power after Ataturk denied that the Kurds existed in Turkey until 1991, justifying their persecution under the rubric of fighting terrorism. However, in November 1991, then-prime minister Suleyman Demirel said the Kurdish issue was "Turkey's top problem," calling into question the previous oppressive policies.