Mountain Turks
Mountain Turks (Turkish: Dağ Türkleri) is an ethnophaulism for the Kurds in Turkey . According to Kemalist doctrine, all citizens of Turkey , including the Kurds , were by definition Turks . Because of their mountainous homeland, the Kurds were declared "Mountain Turks". The term was based on the idea that Kurds do not form an independent ethnic group and are of Turkish origin (from a racial perspective, Turk ırkı ).
Klaus Kreiser writes that the term was occasionally and officially never used in journalism in the 1940s.
In 1983 the Kurdish language was banned by law under the presidency of Kenan Evren . During this time, the pressure to assimilate increased. The existence of the Kurds was denied, the Kurdish identity was negated.
There is now the state-financed and controlled Kurdish broadcaster TRT 6 .