“Whether you call it a terror problem, a southeastern Anatolia problem or a Kurdish problem, this is the first question for Turkey,” Abdullah Gül declared in May. “It has to be solved.” With these words from the president, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, the AKP) put the long-simmering tensions between the state and the country’s millions of Kurds squarely on the front burner. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan then announced a major new initiative, whose Turkish title literally translates as the “Kurdish opening.” Soon after that, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, announced that he had completed a “road map to peace,” 160 handwritten pages proposing means to the end of the fighting between PKK guerrillas and the Turkish army, an on-again, off-again, decades-long war that neither side is strong enough to win or weak enough to lose. Hopes for a definitive answer to Turkey’s “first question” rose high, but few concrete steps were taken

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