political conFlictS and Migration in the Mena StateS 175
modern persecution of Christians in the world.^20 There is no reason to
believe that this tendency will subside.
For the Sunni/Shiite groups, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon are primarily
important, though Shiite activities in other Sunni countries such as Morocco
and Algeria have been cited, albeit without causing open conf licts. The main
Sunni-Shiite conf lict is occurring in Iraq, where the minority Sunnis lost
their dominant position over the majority Shiite population with the fall of
Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, the Sunni Salaf ists consider the Shiites to be
a group that will eventually have to be driven out. There is a similar situation
in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia, where the Shiite population in the Eastern
provinces feels discriminated against and marginalised (Teitelbaum 2011).
In both countries, Shiites started revolting against this situation in 2011.
One of the major ethnic/ethnic-linguistic conf licts in the MENA region
concerns the Kurds. In principle, as far as our topic is concerned, the Kurdish
problem is an internal Turkish problem (Chrisdoulaki 2011). Since the 1960s,
large parts of the Kurd population, especially adolescents and students, have
been shaped by socialist thought. The result was the rise of the PKK, an
acronym for the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, devoted to the f ight against
colonialism and the foreign exploitation of natural resources, and demanding
the right to cultural self-determination and independence from the Turk-
ish state. Turkey fought these tendencies with all the means at its disposal,
including its military might. Its efforts to eliminate the PKK by forceful means
picked up from the mid-1990s on (Krech 1999).^21 Following a lull after the year
2000, f ighting between the Turkish army and the PKK resumed in 2004/2005
as the result of the consolidation in Northern Iraq – reaching a climax in 2007.
The conf lict continued, escalating again in 2010/2011. The number of victims
of this conf lict is now extremely high. Besides the dead and wounded, there
are a great many refugees both within the area and in other countries of
Europe (particularly Germany) – the conf lict led to the displacement of up
to 1.2 million persons inside Turkey over the last three decades.
A second ethnic/ethnic-linguistic conf lict concerns the berberophone
peoples. Berberophone populations (they call themselves Imazighen,
singular Amazigh) today live, albeit very scattered, in the North African
states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, as well as in Mauretania and
20 Between 2003 and 2011, nearly 900,000 Catholics and Orthodox left Iraq, where the number
of Christians is estimated at present to be around 500,000.
21 Because of the escalating war, relations with Turkey became strained, as described above,
especially with their direct neighbours Iraq, Syria and Iran, since the Turkish government
accused these countries of supporting the PKK. The PKK, for their part, used the Kurdish
settlements in all these areas as retreats (in addition to their training camps).