Türkiye'de bir entelektüel: Tarık Ziya Ekinci ve etnik kimlik konusundaki politik seyri

Tarık Ziya Ekinci is one of the most important intellectuals who meditate about the ethnic question in Turkey since 1960?s. As one of the eminent leaders of the eastern delegates of Turkey Worker?s Party and as a deputy in parliament, he became the party?s spokesman about ?the Eastern Question?. The uneven regional development that he emphasized is a theme which made possible the treatment of Kurdish question from a Marxist perspective and which inserted the concept of spatiality to the perception of this question. During the 70?s, following the organizational and ideological separation of Kurdish and Turkish lefts, the uneven regional development discourse is replaced by the colonialism thesis, which became dominant in the Kurdish leftist milieu. The colonialism thesis, which can be considered as the Kurdish national democratic revolution strategy, identify the national question with the territoriality principle and this resulted in the transformation of Marxist discourse to nationalist one. As to Tarık Ziya Ekinci, he never defended the colonialism thesis and he discusses the concrete mechanisms for the solution of the ethnic conflict by referring to the personality principle and by dissociating the national identity from the territoriality principle