Indeed, Today’s Zaman reports that such is the optimism of one observer, Professor Mücahit Bilici, a sociologist at the City University of New York, that he presages a ‘Kurdish spring’ in a post-PKK era.

He comments that Turkey, under the AKP, has experienced a revolution, one that relieved the country of the straitjacket of Kemalism. Bilici contends that this was only the first revolution that Turkey requires; two more are necessary, so there would be a trilogy all told. The second of the three should result in the Kurds being given ‘a state that belongs to them’. In Bilici’s estimation that state should be Turkey, a Turkey shorn of pretensions or aspirations to ethnic homogeneity, a Turkey that is not just a homeland for the Turks but for others as well, a state that ‘belongs to all citizens as individuals and as groups’. The third revolution should be the recognition of the past wrongs done to Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities and the restoration of their rights in the present, Bilici argues.

Bilici envisages the PKK being absorbed into the political framework, their monopolisation of Kurdish discourse being dispelled, a transformation that will result in a ‘democratic Kurdish resurgence against which a democratic Turkey will have no defence’. As he foresees it, the continuation –and ultimate resolution – of the Kurdish struggle will be carried out within an Islamic discourse.

Bilici’s predictions perhaps seem unduly optimistic. While nationalism, and the military establishment which fans it, is not as pervasive in the Turkey of 2013 it is still not a spent force and there remain elements who would recoil in horror at some of Bilici’s sentiments and predictions.  That said, the political arena is much more receptive to such ideas than it was in earlier decades. This can be attributed to a growing realisation that the military struggle against the PKK was not likely to produce an enduring solution, to the fact that Öcalan was in custody, but also to the AKP’s recasting of the national identity. In this they have emphasised an umbrella of Islamic brotherhood that offers Kurds a way of opting in, rather than the ethno-nationalist framework that is at the core of Kemalism that left Kurds at a loose end.