Currently in Istanbul, shortly on my way to Diyarbakir and the country’s southeast—the predominantly Kurdish region adjacent to the northern Iraq border that is so much in the news of late.

I have been researching here for the past couple weeks, so please excuse the lack of posting. Current events have taken me on a few interesting detours from the themes I was initially trying to report on. More about my work here will be uploaded in the coming days.

I will say for now that the subject of Turkish identity in a globalizing world has been getting the pressure cooker treatment over the past couple of weeks. First it was the U.S. Congressional sub-committee debate over recognizing the Armenian genocide—a subject that establishment politicians, nationalist organizations which enjoy some sway, and many average Turks are loathe to revisit. Even before the current crisis over PKK attacks in southern Turkey staged from mountainous safe havens northern Iraq, many were loudly calling for the government here to redraw their traditional alliance with the United States and NATO.

The PKK attacks have stirred nationalist ferment even further, leading to reprisals against Kurdish politicians, journalists and civilians across Turkey—something which has been reported a little here, but hardly at all abroad. Many Kurds accuse the government of doing little to defuse the growing hysteria, and suggest instead that they are helping to raise it to an even higher pitch in order to build consensus for the military incursion into Iraq. Kurds have seen minor progress in recent years toward getting their grievances aired, especially since PKK kingpin Abdullah Öcalan’s capture in 1999, but most of those I have interviewed say that the polarization between Turks and Kurds is the worst it has been in a long time.

And so perhaps it’s timely that Turkey should be celebrating Republic Day, the 84th anniversary of the founding of the nation by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Istanbul is festooned with flags and banners from minaret-top to street level kiosk-toe. For the first time since the PKK ambush in the southeast that killed twelve Turkish soldiers on October 21, President Abdullah Gül has made some vaguely conciliatory remarks regarding the ethnic hostilities as part of his special address to the nation today. He noted how the country’s multicultural reality has endowed it with a certain “richness” and worried that public outrage over the PKK should not undermine national unity.

The military and nationalists like to invoke Atatürk’s famous dictum that All of us are Turks. It’s just that the country’s Kurdish people have historically been allowed little opportunity to discuss what that actually means for them.