Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A portrait of Abdullah Ocalan is diplayed on the t-shirt of a Kurd at the Syria-Turkey border on Aug. 23

LONDON — Turkish intelligence agents have been making the short hop from Istanbul across the Sea of Marmara to the prison Island of Imrali in recent weeks for talks with a jailed Kurdish separatist leader who was once Turkey’s most wanted man.

Abdullah Ocalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the P.K.K., has been languishing on Imrali since he was captured in Nairobi, Kenya in 1999 while on the run. He is serving a life term after a death sentence was commuted.

Now the Turkish government wants his help to end a resurgent war with P.K.K. rebels that has claimed around 900 lives in the last year and a half.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, revealed the dialog last week when he told state-run TRT television, “I cannot hold such meetings myself as a politician but the state has agents and they do.”

In an acknowledgement that the latest escalation in a three-decade battle against the Kurdish insurgents was probably unwinnable, Yalcin Akdogan, a senior adviser to Mr. Erdogan, said that the talks were aimed at persuading the P.K.K. to disarm.

“The government supports any dialog to this end that could result in a halt to violence,” Mr. Akdogan said in a television interview. “You cannot get results and abolish an organization only with armed struggle.”

The strategy of seeking a deal with the P.K.K. has implications for Turkey’s policy in neighboring Syria, as Rendezvous wrote last summer, where Kurdish militants linked to the organization have taken over territory vacated by retreating government forces.

Turkey “fears that an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria would become a haven for Kurdish militants to carry out cross-border attacks in the Kurdish areas in southeastern Turkey,” my colleague Tim Arango recently reported from the border region.

Tensions over Syria and the Kurdish issue have also led to a souring of Turkey’s relations with Iran and the Iraqi government in Baghdad, as Ankara struggled to cope with the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring.

There is a question mark over how much authority the jailed Mr. Ocalan has over the P.K.K. leadership, which is based in the Qandil mountains in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “He remains a figure of symbolic importance,” Mr. Akdogan said of the P.K.K. founder. “But we still have to wait and see how Qandil will react.”

Mr. Ocalan’s capture in 1999 was a cause of national celebration among Turks after the worst years of a war that has cost 40,000 lives, including those of Turkish and Kurdish civilians. The P.K.K. is regarded as a terrorist organization by, among others, the United States and the European Union.

However, the Turkish authorities have not shrunk from dealing with Mr. Ocalan in the past to intervene in Kurdish matters.

In November, he saved the authorities from an escalating crisis that threatened to worsen tensions with the Kurds by calling on hundreds of his imprisoned supporters to halt a two-month hunger strike. The protesters had been demanding an end to Mr. Ocalan’s isolation and improved rights for Turkey’s Kurdish minority, which makes up 20 percent of its population.

Andrew Finkel wrote in the IHT’s Global Views opinion section that the intervention signaled the resumption of Mr. Ocalan’s career.

Mr. Ocalan is now reportedly demanding direct contact with the P.K.K.’s leadership and improved prison conditions as the price for his cooperation in persuading the militants to lay down their arms.

Some observers have cast doubt on the government’s strategy of dealing with Mr. Ocalan while failing to carry out reforms in favor of the country’s Kurdish minority.

David Rohde wrote in Rendezvous at the weekend that more than 10,000 Kurds were imprisoned in Turkey on various terrorism charges.

According to Hugh Pope, project director of the International Crisis Group in Turkey, the government of Mr. Erdogan is putting the cart before the horse. “They need to find a Kurdish settlement first before cutting a deal with the P.K.K.,” he told Rendezvous from Istanbul.

That would include instituting promised reforms that would give equality to Turkey’s Kurdish citizens, including the right to a Kurdish-language education.

“The P.K.K. wants to do a deal and obviously Ocalan is desperate to get out of jail,” Mr. Pope said. “He may be an essential ingredient but he’s not the magic key.”

via To End Kurdish Conflict, Turkey Calls on Archenemy – NYTimes.com.

Report says Turkey’s Kurdish conflict has turned more violent

Istanbul (CNN) — Turkey’s long-simmering war with a Kurdish insurgency has escalated over the last year, reaching death tolls unseen in more than a decade, a new report focusing on the conflict says.

“Turkey’s Kurdish conflict is becoming more violent, with more than 700 dead in fourteen months, the highest casualties in thirteen years,” concluded the International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organization that has extensively researched Turkey’s war with the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

“We’re seeing the longest pitched battles between the army and the PKK, we’re seeing a wide-spread campaign of kidnapping, suicide bombings and terrorist attacks by the PKK. They’re very much on the offensive and unfortunately this is matched by much harder line rhetoric on both sides,” added Hugh Pope, the chief author of the International Crisis Group report, in an interview with CNN.

115 Kurdish rebels killed in 14 days

Last weekend alone, at least eight Turkish police officers and four soldiers were killed in two separate ambushes in southeastern Turkey. The PKK promptly claimed responsibility for both attacks.

The Turkish government, meanwhile, claims to have killed hundreds of PKK fighters in recent months, both in operations in southeastern, predominantly Kurdish-populated Turkey and during air raids against suspected PKK camps in the mountains of northern Iraq.

“Within the last month, in the operations executed throughout the region, about 500 terrorists were eliminated,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech Monday. “We will on the one hand develop Turkey and on the other hand continue to tirelessly struggle against this terrorist organization that has bloody hands.”

The escalation of violence and hard-line rhetoric on both sides has jeopardized hopes of bringing an end to a conflict that has bedeviled Turkey for 30 years. It also threatens to destabilize a member of the NATO military alliance that is already grappling with the influx of more than 80,000 refugees fleeing the civil war in neighboring Syria.

For decades, the Turkish state discriminated against the Kurds, Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, which now makes up roughly 20% of the population. The Kurdish language was banned, and Kurds were long referred to as “mountain Turks.”

The PKK, led by one of its founders, Abdullah Ocalan, launched a bloody campaign to carve out an independent homeland for Kurds from Turkey, as well as neighboring Iran, Iraq and Syria, in the 1980s. The conflict killed more than 30,000 people, most of them ethnic Kurds.

The war that raged across southeastern Turkey subsided when the PKK declared a unilateral cease-fire for several years after Ocalan was captured in 1999.

In 2005, Erdogan’s government began secret talks with PKK leaders.

His Justice and Development Party, or AKP, also made a number of overtures toward the Kurds, relaxing bans on Kurdish language education, appearing to apologize for past discriminatory policies and launching a state Kurdish-language TV station.

“The AKP government actually did more for the Kurds than anyone up until now,” Pope said. “[But] when a wave of massive arrests of legitimate Kurdish politicians began, that’s when I think young people especially lost hope and the PKK’s arguments for the legitimacy of armed struggle became persuasive to them.”

Turkish authorities have arrested thousands of Kurdish activists, intellectuals and politicians in the past several years. Many of those targeted are members of the Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP, a legal Kurdish political party that elected 29 members to parliament on independent ballots in 2011.

According to this month’s International Crisis Group report, those arrested “include elected deputies, mayors (some from major cities and districts), provincial councilors, party officials and ordinary activists. Many have been accused of membership in a terrorist organization, but not of committing any violent act.”

Last week, 44 journalists and media workers from Kurdish news outlets appeared in an Istanbul courthouse on terrorism charges. Many of them have been awaiting trial in prison since their arrest last December.

“This is to silence the opposition,” said Baran Dogan, one of the defense attorneys in the case. “This is not only about press freedom but also an intervention into a citizen’s right to choose where to get news from.”

In fact, in recent weeks, Turkey’s fiery prime minister has publicly urged the Turkish media not to report on the growing number of Turkish casualties in the conflict, drawing criticism from media freedoms groups.

“Erdogan’s most recent televised ‘message to all the media’ crosses from reprimanding into directly instructing journalists to stop covering the long-standing conflict between the Turkish Armed Forces and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). This is unthinkable,” the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a news release this week.

One of the major obstacles to the peace process, however, is the position staked out by the leaders of the Kurdish movement in Turkey.

Video emerged last month showing several BDP lawmakers embracing and celebrating with armed PKK fighters in the mountains of southeastern Turkey. The scene provided further ammunition for critics who accuse the party of being a public face for the armed rebels.

The International Crisis Group report also points out that the BDP has essentially marginalized itself from negotiations with the Turkish government.

“The BDP says ‘don’t negotiate with us, negotiate with Abdullah Ocalan in prison,’ ” said Pope, the report’s chief author.

Members of the party insist they do not have the power to persuade PKK fighters to lay down their weapons.

“We are not an armed group. If we tell them (the PKK) to lay down arms, will they obey?” Meral Danis Bestas, deputy chairwoman of the BDP, said in a phone interview with CNN.

Over the last decade, Turkey succeeded in forging alliances with neighboring Iran, Syria and Iraq to target Kurdish rebels operating in their respective territories.

But Turkey’s relations with all three governments have deteriorated sharply over the past several years, and the conflict threatens to spill across borders.

This month, Turkish warplanes repeatedly bombed suspected PKK camps in the mountains of northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, Turks watched with alarm this summer as members of the Syrian branch of the PKK raised the guerilla movement’s flag over several predominantly Kurdish towns along Syria’s border with Turkey.

Should Turkey be afraid of the Syrian Kurds?

This has led to accusations from Ankara that Syria and its ally Iran are providing support to the PKK, charges denied by both Damascus and Tehran.

“If Turkey feels vulnerable to empowered Kurds in Syria, the only way to defend itself is to solve its domestic Kurdish problem,” said Pope, the International Crisis Group report author.

The report urged the Turkish government to expand Kurdish language education, redefine Turkey’s broad definition of terrorism and launch a package of measures for reintegration of former Kurdish insurgents. The group also appealed to Kurdish leaders to drop demands for a “self-defence militia” in Kurdish areas of Turkey.

One hope for resolution of the conflict may lie in an effort to rewrite Turkey’s constitution. The document was drafted by a military junta that swept into power in a coup in 1980.

Kurdish lawmakers have joined with Erdogan’s party, as well as two other parties represented in the Turkish parliament, to write a new version of the constitution.

But these reform efforts are being overshadowed by deadly, daily attacks in southeastern Turkey.

On Tuesday morning, Turkish television showed smoke billowing from a burning bus after a suspected PKK attack on a military convoy in eastern Bingol province.

According to Mustafa Hakan Guvencer, the governor of Bingol, the targeted convoy included buses carrying “200 military personnel returning from their vacations unarmed and dressed in civilian clothes.”

The governor said the ambush killed at least 10 soldiers and wounded at least 60.

Nov 6, 2011 10:00 AM EST

The cycle of attack and retaliation has become depressingly familiar: Kurdish guerrillas kill Turkish soldiers in a hit-and-run raid. Politicians express outrage and vow vengeance as patriotic Turks fly flags of solidarity to commemorate the dead from every window and car. Fighter jets, gunships, and commandos stream over Turkey’s southern border to hit the bases of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in the mountains of northern Iraq.

In October the PKK killed 24 Turkish soldiers in a series of coordinated ambushes, and the old pattern kicked into action. But this time there was an important difference—and it wasn’t just the scale of the attacks, which marked the biggest one-day loss to the Turkish security forces since 1993. Rather, the real difference was that a historic attempt by the government to reset relations with Turkey’s estimated 20 million Kurds has failed. That made these recent attacks the opening shots in a vicious new round of the country’s 35-year-old near–civil war.

In 2009 Turkey’s veteran Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan put his political neck on the line by reaching out to rebel Kurds, offering an amnesty to those who would come down from the mountains and hand themselves in. In Diyarbakir, the capital of the Kurdish-dominated southeast of Turkey, Erdogan promised to tear down the old jail—notorious for torture—and promised Kurds a new constitution that would “open the door to further change.” In 2010 secret talks were reportedly held on conditions for a permanent ceasefire with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, jailed since 1999 in an island prison in the Sea of Marmara. Hopes were high that the decades-long conflict in the southeast could finally be defused.

Kurdish children play on a road in Yemisli, Hakkari province in southeastern Turkey, on October 22, 2011., Mustafa Ozer / AFP-Getty Images

A year later, instead of a reset, there’s a train wreck. Over the last four months, Erdogan’s “Kurdish opening” has been steadily dismantled piece by piece by Turkey’s judiciary, by the PKK, and even by Erdogan himself. In the run-up to a general election this June, Erdogan—playing for ultranationalist votes—said that if he’d been in power when Öcalan was captured, he would have had him hanged. Turkish judges, known for their hardline views, jailed a series of Kurdish activists, including a mayor who provided municipal services in the Kurdish language (still banned for government communications) and an editor who was sentenced to 166 years for supporting Öcalan in his newspaper. PKK returnees were jailed for terrorism in defiance of a government amnesty. Finally, despite an unusually strong showing by pro-Kurdish parties in elections, courts stripped a Kurdish M.P. of his parliamentary seat on a technicality—and then, to add insult to injury, allocated it to Erdogan’s ruling AK Party. As a result, Kurdish M.P.s boycotted Parliament and announced a campaign for greater powers for local government—an initiative they call “democratic autonomy.” Autonomy was, of course, exactly what Erdogan’s original outreach was supposed to avoid. And in the wake of the latest attacks, Turkish police further alienated Kurdish opinion by arresting 44 prominent Kurdish intellectuals in a probe into the PKK’s political wing.

Derailing the peace process is exactly what the old-school, Moscow-trained Marxist revolutionaries who run the PKK want. Since early summer, the PKK has been in an all-out war with the Turkish Army. Shootings, bombings, and ambushes have become a weekly occurrence, leaving at least 55 Turkish soldiers dead since June. And the Turkish military and public have risen to meet the challenge, just as the PKK intended. In the wake of October’s shootings, hundreds of thousands of Turks rallied against the PKK across central and western Turkey, calling for “martyrs’ blood to be avenged.”

With public anger running so high and hardliners on both sides intoxicated by the upsurge of violence, it’s clear that Erdogan’s Kurdish opening is dead in the water. Last year Kurdish moderates like Diyarbakir Mayor Osman Baydemir dared to speak out against the PKK, saying that “the time for armed struggle is over.” Öcalan, speaking through his lawyers, told him to shut up or “the youth will rip your mouth apart.” At the same time, the only thing the PKK has been able to come up with by way of new ideology is a charter for its latest political incarnation, the “Kurdish Communities Union,” which talks of “village communes” guided by the will of Öcalan, “our ultimate decision maker.” It’s not far from the notorious “village communism” of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

Yet even though the PKK has left 40,000 dead over 35 bloody years and forced the depopulation of millions of villagers into the cities, there’s little sign that its support is petering out. Europe’s other separatist terror movements—the Basque ETA, the Irish Republican Army—went out of business after the majority of the local population grew revolted by years of senseless bloodshed. In southeast Turkey, on the contrary, there have been massive demonstrations in support of the PKK, not against it. PKK fighters who took advantage of the amnesty offer were welcomed last year as heroes by cheering crowds tens of thousands strong. The PKK makes sure that its “support” remains strong by ruthlessly punishing those who speak out against it, or who refuse to pay protection money. In September, for instance, PKK sympathizers threw a Molotov cocktail at a street vendor in Nusaybin, setting the man on fire. In Tunisia, a street vendor who set himself on fire tipped off a revolution; in Turkey, it’s the would-be revolutionaries who do the burning to suppress dissent.

One doesn’t have to look far for clues as to what the PKK—or the government, for that matter—will do next. During the last upsurge of PKK violence five years ago, bombers targeted civilians in Istanbul and in tourist centers. The chief of Turkey’s General Staff warned recently that the PKK “is shifting to urban terrorism as part of a plan to take over state authority.” He’s clearly planning to use the renewal of violence to claw back some of the Army’s tattered prestige, rocked by the arrest of more than 120 former and serving officers on charges of ordering extrajudicial executions, planning coups, and plotting to destabilize the government. He called on Turks “to preserve the indivisible unity of the Turkish state and the nation” by “paying attention to the morale of the security forces.” Decoded, that means: lay off criticizing the military. Having spent nearly a decade cutting the political power of the Army down to size, Erdogan faces the prospect of the military retaking the initiative on a wave of patriotic fervor.

In short, everyone’s a loser—except the PKK, which has successfully sabotaged Erdogan’s attempt to bring moderates to the fore and end Öcalan’s monopoly as sole champion of Kurdish rights. In part, that’s Erdogan’s fault for taking cheap political anti-Öcalan shots rather than sticking to his brave new initiative. But mostly it shows the power that a group of well-organized revolutionaries can still exercise on a traditional, poor society with a strong martyr culture and an all-consuming sense of grievance. And small wonder, given the broken promises from the government on everything from amnesty to greater representation in Parliament. It’s not until Ankara succeeds in convincing Turkey’s Kurdish underclass that they’re better off believing the government’s promises over the PKK’s that the vicious cycle will ever be broken.