AI is helping Kurds defeat Turkey’s century-long campaign of assimilation - opinion

OCTOBER 28, 2026 17:00Imagine asphalt paving work on a highway. A paving machine and a human work together. The machine is an automaton, running on its code. An accident happens, and the human is killed by the machine. As its code dictates, the automaton continues its work, while the human lies dead on the road. No passerby comes to the rescue.The Turkish state was established by the British, just like Iran. With Istanbul under British occupation and the old Ottoman establishment beaten but intact, the British chose Mustafa Kemal to build a new state in Ankara, just as they chose an army officer in Tehran to become Shah, and the two men set out on almost identical agendas, one for the Turks and the other for the Persians.Kemal and many of those around him were immigrants from the Ottoman Balkans, descendants of Ottoman Muslims, as were many of Turkey’s military chiefs, prime ministers and presidents until the 1990s.There was already a growing Turkish nationalism, influenced by the French Revolution, but Kemal’s rapidly turned into an extremist one, admired by both Hitler and Mussolini. According to the historian Stefan Ihrig, Hitler said in 1938 that Ataturk was the teacher, Mussolini his first student, and he himself the second.All non-Muslims of the lands the new Turkish republic now governed, and all those who refused to accept the racially defined Turkish national identity, were subject to oppression. Famously, towns across the new republic fined those who spoke a language other than Turkish in public.KURDISH PROTESTERS carry flags and a banner with a portrait of jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan during a demonstration against Turkey’s military action in northeastern Syria in Zurich, Switzerland, this week (credit: REUTERS/ARND WIEGMANN)Kurds refused the identity imposed on them, which called them “mountain Turks” and claimed that the word Kurd came from the sound boots make on snow.For over a hundred years, the Turkish state has effectively banned the Kurdish language and, through soft and hard policies, oppressed Kurdish identity: periodic arrests of senior Kurdish figures, terror against Kurdish communities, the targeting of population pockets in Kurdistan, and the forced exile of whole communities and influential figures.In all this time, Kurdish was never accepted as the language of a people. Anything that could define a Kurdish identity, including the acceptance that Kurds exist at all, was targeted by any means necessary.In Turkey, racism is shared across the whole political spectrum, and there is no visible Turkish anti-racist movement. In apartheid South Africa, many white people stood in the movement against it. I can only liken the situation of the Kurds to the paving automaton and the human worker.The Turkish state is that automaton, programmed by the British and set to move on no matter what, and the “no matter what” is the whole Kurdish population. The worker lies dead on the road, and no one comes to help.The Turkish state’s reach does not stop at its borders. In 2002, Turkey’s ambassador in Kazakhstan protested to the Kazakh government over reports of Kurdish-language schooling there. In 2019, when Tokyo University of Foreign Studies began offering Kurdish classes, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry reportedly pressed Tokyo to end them.At home, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan put it in the simplest terms when a Kurdish worker asked him about the Kurdish problem during a visit to Russia: “If you don’t think of it, there is no such problem.”Turkish racist policy toward the Kurds has failed, though, and the irony is that a machine helped defeat it. The automaton that is the Turkish state rolled over the Kurd; a new machine, AI, is lifting the Kurd back up.In just the last couple of years, AI has turned Turkish assimilation so upside down that Turkish racism, a policy that in my view has no equivalent, denying a people’s identity in full and assimilating them into one they are not and oppose, can now only be described as somewhere between absurd and outright comical.To date, officially, there is no Kurd in Turkey: the constitution calls every citizen a Turk. There is not a single school providing full-time education in Kurdish, the language of 15 to 20 million citizens of the Republic of Turkey.Yet after a hundred years, AI is giving new life to a language and an identity the state tried to erase from Kurdish minds. AI is free of bans, and it does not discriminate; the language ban has no effect there. Kurds write in their own language, create content in their own language, and learn their banned history with AI. It is a true rebirth.Erasing the Kurd within the Kurd has failed, and the state behind the policy is losing as Kurds flourish online, discover their roots, and unite with their brethren across borders they never agreed to. It is losing offline too. Amedspor of Diyarbakır, promoted to Turkey’s top football league this year, now brings Kurdish chants and Kurdish identity into stadiums across the country every week.For a century, the question of the Kurds was called the Kurdish Problem. It has now become the Turkish Problem.Kurds pay full taxes, yet have zero recognition and no representation as a people. Their economic confidence is growing in Kurdistan and in Turkish cities, and so is their recognition around the world as a people with agency.Netanyahu criticizes Erdogan over KurdsAt the UN General Assembly last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of Erdogan: “He has murdered thousands of Kurdish civilians.”The time has come for Turkey either to face an anti-apartheid-style movement or to address the issue by fully recognizing the distinct identity of its Kurdish citizens and their autonomous agency in Kurdistan. There is no space left to continue with an ideology that is a remnant of Hitler and Mussolini. The time is now.Mem Husedin, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics.Follow us on Google