Survey of Terrorism ••• 423torial integrity. The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) fought openly for inde¬
pendence and committed terrorist acts in Turkey. Some observers believe
that the Turkish army responded with tactics that violated the rights of its
Kurdish citizens and may have amounted to a form of state terror. Since the
capture of its leader in 1999, however, the fighting has died down. The
Turkish government now lets the Kurds use their language in schools and
even on state-sponsored radio, and Kurdish refugees are returning home.
The PKK has changed its name and become a nonviolent pressure group,
but violent incidents still occur, Kurdish arms caches have been found, and
some Kurdish fighters from Iraq have fled into Turkey.
Turkey's worst recent atrocity was the simultaneous bombing of two
Istanbul synagogues in 2003, probably perpetrated by a Turkish affiliate of
al-Qa'ida. The country has a relatively advanced industrial economy
(which has benefited from what otherwise would have been a ruinous in¬
flation), good schools and universities, and a thriving democratic political
system. In free elections held in 2002 for the Grand National Assembly, the
Justice and Development Party (Islamist) got 34 percent of the popular
vote, followed by the Republican People's Party (secular) with 19 percent.
The results reflect a division between secular and religious forces that has
persisted up to the present. Commercial and diplomatic relations with
Greece and other European countries are improving. The Cyprus dispute
may be resolved, and Turkey may have entered the European Union by the
time you are reading this book.
Iran
The Islamic revolution is now more than a quarter century old. Most of
Iran's 70 million citizens are too young to remember the shah's regime. The
Islamic republic has become, to some and perhaps most youthful Iranians,
a regime of old men, hardly the idealistic band of young people who ousted
the shah and occupied the US embassy in 1979. Iran's economy has bene¬
fited from new discoveries of oil and its rising price on world markets, but
the dominance of state-owned enterprises has hobbled industrialization.
The national currency has fallen fourfold in relation to the dollar since
- The government has taken steps toward reducing the gap between
rich and poor and correcting the worst abuses of the land reform and other
vestiges of the shah's regime.
Terrorism is no longer a problem within the country. The government
has gradually softened its rhetoric on spreading the Islamic revolution and
has kept its distance from al-Qa'ida, but it does give material and moral
support to Hizballah in Lebanon and to resistance fighters in Iraq under