But let me tell you what this pragmatic approach is hiding: Ever since peace talks between the Turkish government and the P.K.K. broke down last summer, the country has been in havoc.

Last August, Kurdish youth groups close to the P.K.K. began an insurgency in some Kurdish towns. The government responded first with tear gas and plastic bullets, later with 24-hour curfews that lasted for weeks and finally with tanks and artillery. Photos from some of the besieged towns look like early pictures from the Syrian civil war. More than 300,000 people had to evacuate their homes. The death toll is over 1,000, hundreds of whom are civilians, according to the Turkish Human Rights Foundation. Large parts of the Kurdish towns of Cizre, Silopi and the historic Sur are now heaps of rubble.

While the government and the P.K.K. have different views on why peace talks collapsed, there is no doubt about what motivates Mr. Erdogan’s continuing military campaign. He is stoking nationalist sentiment with an eye to a possible referendum this summer that would expand his constitutional powers.

Perhaps a little background is necessary here: Kurdish people living in Turkey have been waging a struggle for greater freedoms for decades. Generations have perished in prisons and torture chambers as Turkey has gone through successive military coups. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, we were not allowed to speak Kurdish, speak about speaking Kurdish or even sing in Kurdish. I became a human rights lawyer in part because my older brother went to jail for trying to do grass-roots activism — just organizing peaceful demonstrations under a political party was enough to get him labeled a terrorist.

We have come a long way in terms of Kurdish cultural rights, but Turkey is still far behind the rest of the world in basic democratic freedoms. True, the peace talks with the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan over the past few years did bring us a much-needed cease-fire and a breathing space to celebrate our political views. But since then, the negotiations have fallen apart and the Turkish government has sought to reverse those gains. The Turkish government is meanwhile trying to expand its draconian antiterrorism laws to censor speech and other political activities.