But as the taboos are being broken (though not removed), politicians have begun to question these tactics and the treatment of minorities: Altan Tan, a member of parliament from the Peace and Democratic Party, has stated that “for a long time those allegations had been circulating, but they were denied by the authorities.”

Tan urged Interior Minister Muammer Guler to make a statement on the issue. “If there is such a thing going on, it is a major disaster. The state illegally profiling its own citizens based on ethnicity and religion, and doing this secretly, is a big catastrophe,” Tan said.

Even after the Genocide, the remaining Armenians in Turkey experienced the brunt of this discriminatory racist policy. One expression of that policy was the “wealth tax” (varlik vergisi), which was levied on Armenians, Jews and Greeks in the 1940s; those who were unable to pay the exorbitant taxes were sent to labor camps to perish.

Another policy which exists to this day is the appointment of Turkish assistant principals at Armenian schools. The community is free to hire an Armenian principal, but the power resides in the hands of the assistant principal, who must be an ethnic Turk. In reality, Turks serving in that capacity are the official government spies, placed there to enforce restrictive government policies and to report to higher-ups if any Armenian history is being taught secretly in those schools. That is why young people graduating from Armenian schools and emigrating to the West are dumbfounded to discover there is such a thing called Armenian history.

The Kurds do not have any race codes because they had been designated for assimilation. Beginning with Ataturk, who perpetrated the Dersim pogroms against the Kurds, successive administrations have been trying to convince the Kurds that there is no distinct ethnic group known as Kurd; that the Kurds better consider themselves as “mountain Turks.” Despite all atrocities and persecutions, no Kurd was ever convinced to be anything but a Kurd.

The Kurdish minority — which accounts for one third of Turkey’s population — is on the verge of emancipation. The establishment of Iraqi Kurdistan has fueled aspirations of the Kurds throughout the region and especially in Turkey. It looks like in the bloodbath of the civil war in Syria, another autonomous region for Kurds is shaping up.