Tag: PKK

PKK Executions: Turkey, Kurds Blame Each Other For Slayings Of Sakine Cansiz, Militant Activists

PARIS — Turkey’s prime minister suggested Friday that a feud among Kurdish rebels was behind the shooting deaths of three Kurdish activists in Paris, and the rebels said it was an attempt to undermine peace talks that their jailed leader is holding with Turkey.

The three activists, including reportedly the founding member of the autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebel group Kurdistan Workers Party, also known as PKK, were found inside a Kurdish center in the French capital on Thursday. The killings stunned the Kurdish community in Europe and put France in a delicate position as it tries to improve ties with Turkey.

Kurds have accused Turkey of the slayings, while Turkish officials have suggested the killings may be part of an internal feud or an attempt to derail the talks.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday that the need for a code to enter the Kurdish center where the women died, suggested that the women probably knew the killer. Erdogan indicated that the center was locked from the inside.

“It’s not something that people who don’t know the code can open,” Erdogan told a group of journalists aboard a plane on his return from a visit to Senegal. “Those three opened (the door). They wouldn’t open the door to people they don’t know.”

A PKK statement, carried by the Kurdish Firat news agency, condemned the killings and said they were an “attempt to undermine” the talks between Turkey and Ocalan.

It blamed the deaths on “international powers” and alleged secretive forces in Turkey and added: “the killings will not remain without a response.”

Turkey is holding peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers Party, which seeks self-rule for Kurds in the country’s southeast, to try to persuade it to disarm. The conflict between PKK and the Turkish government has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1984.

Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor, said one of the women killed was “very, very probably” Sakine Cansiz, a founding member of the PKK in her 50s. The other two victims have been identified as Leyla Soylemez and Fidan Dogan, Kurdish activists in their 20s.

The three women were all killed with multiple gunshots to the head, Thibault-Lecuivre said. France’s interior minister has called the slayings an “execution.”

Family members of the victims came to Paris and were meeting with French authorities and members of the Kurdish community Friday. Visitors placed candles and flowers in front of the building housing the information center where they were killed.

Mourner Selik Hick said he had known one of the victims, Cansiz. She “gave her life for freedom and for the freedom of the Kurdish people,” Hick, 46, said at the site.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported that the autopsies will take about a week, and that the families planned to take the bodies to Turkey for burial. It said police spoke with the Kurdistan Information Center’s neighbors, but that no one had witnessed the attack.

Kurds from Germany and Turkey came to Paris to express support, and planned a demonstration in the French capital Saturday.

___

Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

via PKK Executions: Turkey, Kurds Blame Each Other For Slayings Of Sakine Cansiz, Militant Activists.

January 12, 2013
Kurdish Assassinations in Paris Put Spotlight on Turkey-PKK Talks

French justice authorities scrambled for clues Thursday into the assassination of three women in a Kurdish institute in Paris — a crime that appeared to have clear political overtones. Two of the victims were shot in the head, in what Interior Minister Manuel Valls said was “no doubt an execution.” One of them was Sakine Cansiz, a co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group that has waged an often violent Kurdish separatist struggle against Turkey and which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the E.U.

FREDERICK FLORIN / AFP / Getty Images
People attending a demonstration in Strasbourg, France, on Jan. 10, 2013, hold photos of three Kurdish activists killed in Paris
Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/01/10/kurdish-assassinations-in-paris-turn-a-spotlight-on-turkey-pkk-talks/#ixzz2HizGJqzZ

The slayings come at a sensitive time. Turkish media report that the Ankara government has recently made progress toward ending the nearly three decades of violence through unpublicized peace talks with some PKK leaders, included jailed PKK chief Abdullah Ocalan. Such peace talks are not supported by all PKK militants — a strategic division that may have caused a schism within the group.

(MORE: How the Kurds Have Changed Turkey’s Calculations on Syria)

Reports on Thursday quoted top Turkish politicians speculating that the Paris murders were a result of “an internal feud” within the PKK. But that claim was rejected by many of the hundreds of Kurds who gathered Thursday morning outside the Kurdish Information Center in Paris where the killings took place; instead, they blamed Ankara.

“The murder of these three Kurdish women, at this time, is a political crime,” Berivan Akyol, a worker at the center, told French news channel i-télé. “These three victims … represent all Kurds.”

The deceased had apparently been shot Wednesday afternoon and were discovered around 1 a.m. Thursday after concerned colleagues failed to reach them by phone. In addition to PKK co-founder Cansiz, a woman described as a representative of the Brussels-based Kurdistan National Congress was among the dead. According to the Firat news agency — which is considered sympathetic to the Kurdish cause — two of the women were shot in the head and a third in the stomach by a silencer-fitted gun.

French security officials tell TIME it’s too early to openly speculate about who was behind the killings, though two obvious theories are already under consideration. Given the brutality with which Turkey has at times sought to suppress Kurdish nationalism and the violent methods sometimes used by the PKK in its struggle for autonomy, French authorities believe that both scenarios — an assassination ordered by the PKK’s enemies or a deadly factional split — are equally plausible.

(MORE: French Draft Law on Armenian Genocide Rocks Franco-Turkish Relations)

The first thesis, said a French security official who did not want to be quoted, might aim at weakening PKK factions hostile to negotiating an end to the conflict. The second, he added, might seek to further widen the split between rival PKK camps over peace talks, thereby hampering further efforts in striking a deal with Turkey. But whatever the motive for the killings, Valls pledged to bring to justice those responsible.

“The antiterrorism and [homicide] units have been mobilized to shed light on this absolutely intolerable act,” Valls said Thursday morning outside the Kurdish center, not far from Paris’ Gare du Nord train station. “I have come to express my compassion for those who are close to these three women.”

Valls was also addressing the hundreds of sorrowful and angry Kurds who’d flocked to the center early Thursday, chanting Ocalan’s name and “We are all PKK.” About 150,000 Kurds live in France, many as political exiles. Meanwhile, despite the PKK’s terrorist designation, the organization has enjoyed the ambivalent support of many in Europe sympathetic to the Kurdish plight.

That ambivalence has at times also been reflected by French justice officials. While authorities have repeatedly arrested militants suspected of organizing or financing acts of PKK terrorism, less troublesome party members and sympathizers are generally left alone. The 28-year battle between the PKK and Turkey has claimed about 40,000 lives, with violence at times having spilled into other countries. The chants of “A political solution for Kurdistan” among Kurdish mourners in Paris on Thursday appeared to express hopes that this new trio of deaths in that struggle will be the last.

via Kurdish Assassinations in Paris Put Spotlight on Turkey-PKK Talks | TIME.com.

January 12, 2013
Will the Paris shooting derail the Turkey-PKK talks?

Posted by Olga Khazan on January 10, 2013 at 12:13 pm

It’s still unclear who killed three women prominent in Turkey’s Kurdish autonomy movement, who were found shot to death in Paris on Thursday, and why. One of the three, Sakine Cansiz, was a founding member of the rebel PKK movement and first senior female member of the organization. The other two, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, where activists working on behalf of the PKK in Europe.

Hundreds of people of Kurdish origin demonstrate on January 10, 2013 in central Marseille following the killing of three Kurdish women activists in Paris. (Getty)

Turkish nationalists and Kurdish officials are each blaming the other for the slayings, which threaten to derail recent peace talks between the Turkish government and a jailed PKK leader.

One theory holds that the murder might have been prompted by internal feuding among the PKK, which is regarded as a terrorist group by Europe, the United States and Turkey. Huseyin Celik, the deputy chairman of Turkey’s ruling party, suggested the killings were an attempt to stop the peace deal.

“Whenever in Turkey we reach the stage of saying ‘friend, give up this business, let the weapons be silent,’ whenever a determination emerges on this, such incidents happen,” Celik told reporters in Ankara.

The Turkish daily Hurriyet said Cansiz was “known for her opposition to the alleged head of the PKK’s armed-wing, Syrian citizen Ferman Hussein.”

From the other side: PKK Europe secretary Zubeyir Aydar and other Kurdish political figures implied that the so-called Turkish “deep state” were behind the murders. The deep state is sort of a shadow government of military officers and civilians who have for decades “suppressed and sometimes murdered dissidents, Communists, reporters, Islamists, Christian missionaries, and members of minority groups—anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order,” in Turkey according to a New Yorker profile of the group. The enmity between Kurds and the deep state goes back decades, the article said:

[The Deep State] played a central role in combating the Kurdish insurgency of the nineteen-eighties and nineties—the so-called dirty war—when tens of thousands of guerrillas and civilians were killed or disappeared. Death squads in predominantly Kurdish cities like Diyarbakır operated with near-impunity, even using a signature vehicle: a white Renault sedan, in which military-age Kurdish males were often taken away.

The PKK took up arms in 1984 and to demand greater rights for Turkey’s Kurds, who make up 20 percent of the population. The last 18 months have seen the heaviest fighting between the PKK and Turkish forces in more than a decade.

Earlier this month, the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization met with the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan at the Imrali Island Prison off the coast of Turkey to try to put an end to the conflict, which has claimed the lives of 40,000 people.

The talks revolve around three central points: amnesty for PKK members in prison, house arrest for Ocalan and the PKK giving up arms, according to Al Monitor.

The government is expected to reward a ceasefire with more rights for the Kurds, but Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has resisted the rebels’ demand for the release of Kurdish activists.

“There will be neither amnesty nor house arrest,” he said.

Al Monitor offers more on thae meeting:

One, there will be no division of land.

Two, there is no bargaining on territory that could imply an independent Kurdistan. In any case, the PKK has not been making such a demand for some time now.

Three, there will be no alternative governance including a federation.

Four — and this is the most important — there is no democratic autonomy. Yes, you heard it right. The democratic autonomy Ocalan had envisioned and the Peace and Democracy Party [BDP, Kurdish] had unilaterally declared at the most critical phase of the Oslo negotiations, is not in the new accord Fidan and Ocalan agreed on.

Therefore there will no demand for indigenous defense forces, for popular district committees or to draw a boundary for autonomous areas.

Because the details of the peace road-map are still so sketchy, it’s hard to tell which party would feel weakened by the deal or whether either was involved in the murders. The PKK might be angry over the prospect of a disarmament concession. Or the deep state and other Turkish nationalists could have been set off by the potential for amnesty for PKK members.

“Only the [Nationalist Movement Party] is standing next to the Turkish nation,” the far-right leader Devlet Bahçeli said recently, slamming Turkish leaders for talking with Ocalan. “Did our martyrs die for nothing?”

via Will the Paris shooting derail the Turkey-PKK talks?.

January 11, 2013
Turkey and the PKK: Peace at last?

Turkey and the PKK

Peace at last?

The Turkish government is holding talks with the Kurdish leader

Jan 12th 2013 | ISTANBUL | from the print edition

MIGHT 2013 herald lasting peace between Turkey and its restive Kurds? The question has consumed the country ever since Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, confirmed that his national spy chief, Hakan Fidan, had been holding talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader, on the prison island off Istanbul where he has been held in solitary confinement ever since his capture in 1999.

Soon afterwards a pair of pro-Kurdish deputies were also granted their long-running wish to meet Mr Ocalan. The goal, Mr Erdogan declared, was to persuade the PKK to disarm; but under exactly what conditions continues to be a matter of frenzied speculation.

Mr Erdogan is clearly staking his political future on fixing Turkey’s stickiest problem. The move to go public about the talks has confounded his fans and critics alike. Mr Erdogan has spent much of the past year horrifying liberal supporters with threats to revive the death penalty, raining insults on the “corpse loving” BDP (a pro-Kurdish party), vowing to crush the rebels through military might, and imprisoning hundreds of Kurdish politicians and activists on the thinnest of charges. Mr Erdogan’s hawkish outbursts coincided with the collapse in 2011 of an earlier round of negotiations, with each side blaming the other for their demise. Either way, the accepted wisdom was that Mr Erdogan, who is serving a third and (under internal party rules) final term as prime minister, was courting nationalist votes in order to get himself elected president when the incumbent steps down in 2014.

So what prompted his volte-face? Cynics think that Mr Erdogan wants to run his presidential bid unhampered by violence and that, once elected, he will revert to his hawkish self. Yet Mr Erdogan is taking a risk with his U-turn. As he has warned, saboteurs will try to derail any peace talks through renewed violence and other provocations, which would allow the opposition to pile blame upon the government.

The stakes are higher than ever before. Mr Erdogan knows that, unless he strikes a deal soon, the solution to the Kurdish problem could slip out of Turkey’s hands. Developments in Syria, where President Bashar Assad gave control last June of a string of Kurdish towns to a PKK ally, known as the PYD, have prompted somewhat overblown fears that the PYD will point its guns at Turkey.

Not surprisingly, getting the PYD and fellow Kurdish groups to join the Syrian opposition is said to be part of the agreement being hammered out with Mr Ocalan. Other conditions are said to include the withdrawal of the PKK to bases in northern Iraq and getting fighters to lay down their arms. The government claims Mr Ocalan has disavowed previous calls for regional autonomy for the Kurds, including the right to their own militia army. In exchange the government would pass legal reforms that free thousands of Kurdish prisoners, give amnesty to PKK fighters untainted by violence, boost the power of local government and scrap articles in the constitution that prohibit education in the Kurdish language. Another concession is improving Mr Ocalan’s conditions of internment. A mutually observed ceasefire would pave the way. A May deadline has reportedly been set.

The big question is whether, given the PKK’s growing regional clout, Mr Ocalan can get its leaders on board. He is an icon for PKK members and the glue that makes the PKK’s global network stick. The government relies on him to deliver peace. But the success of this latest stab at peace is far from assured.

via Turkey and the PKK: Peace at last? | The Economist.

January 11, 2013
Turkey’s war hits streets of Paris

Hunt on for killers after three women who supported the Kurdish separatist movement are executed in their office

John Lichfield

Paris

The brutal assassination in central Paris of three Kurdish militants, including a founder member of the separatist group the PKK, sent a wave of shock through France and Turkey today.

The three women were found shot in the head at a Kurdish “information centre” a few steps from the Gare du Nord in the early hours of yesterday morning. The attack is believed to have occurred at least eight hours earlier.

Police broke down the blood-stained door of office in a classic Parisian apartment block and discovered what one officer called a scene of “cold-blooded butchery, almost certainly an execution”. Two of the women had been shot in the back of the head and the other in the forehead and chest.

Turkish government officials and French intelligence sources last night blamed faction-fighting within the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) for the killings. They said that the murders were probably connected to exploratory talks between the Turkish government and the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, which were revealed in the Turkish press on Wednesday. The negotiations were said to have produced a “road-map” to end the 30-year-old civil war in south-eastern Turkey in which 40,000 people are believed to have died. One of the victims – and possibly the principal target – was Sakine Cansiz, in her late 50s, a long-time associate of Mr Ocalan and a founder member of the PKK, which was established in 1978.

In recent years Ms Cansiz had apparently fallen out with the PKK’s splintered leadership, but remained a supporter of the Kurdish separatist cause. Last night President François Hollande said: “This is a horrible crime [involving] three people, one of whom I knew well because she often came to see political leaders [in France].” It is believed that Mr Hollande was referring to Ms Cansiz.

Police sources told the French media that there was no sign of a break-in, suggesting that the three women may have opened the door to whoever killed them. The other victims were named as Fidan Dogan, 28, a Brussels-based official of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), a support-group for the PKK, and Leyla Soylemez, 25, who ran a Kurdish youth association in Paris.

Ms Soylemez’s boyfriend became anxious late on Wednesday night after she failed to go home answer her mobile. He went to the Kurdish Information Office on the Rue Layafette between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est and found traces of blood on the outer door. He called police who broke down the first-floor and found the bodies. Detectives believe the women were killed some time between 3pm and 6pm on Wednesday.

Political assassinations are rare events in Paris or any other Western European capital. The French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, visited the crime scene this morning. “Three women have been murdered, doubtless executed,” he said. “This is a very serious event… The French authorities will do all in their power to throw light on this completely intolerable act.”

Tonight there were a number of theories about who was responsible for the attack. Ms Cansiz had been granted political asylum in France after being imprisoned in Turkey, although did not live permanently in Paris. Kurdish officials in Paris dismissed the “internal quarrel” theory, instead blaming agents of the Turkish government or French-based activists in extreme nationalist Turkish right. Once news of the killings had got out more than 300 Kurdish exiles demonstrated and waved Kurdish flags in the rain close to the murder scene. They chanted “Turkey assassins. Hollande is their accomplice,” and “We are all in the PKK.”

The PKK was founded in 1978 by Mr Ocalan and Ms Cansiz, among others, to campaign for a Marxist Kurdish state in south eastern Turkey and the Kurdish-populated areas of Iran, Iraq and Syria. It began a military campaign in the mid-1980s after repression by the then military junta in Ankara. It is classed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US and the EU and Mr Ocalan has been in a Turkish jail since 1999.

According to reports in the Turkish press on Wednesday, the peace talks between Ankara and Mr Ocalan would involve a ceasefire in return for release of prisoners and official recognition of the Kurdish language and culture. Today’s murders, according to the Turkish government and French intelligence sources, may have been intended to discredit or destroy these talks. The PKK has a history of bloody settlement of internal battles, including, allegedly, murders on foreign soil.

A Turkish political commentator, Emre Uslu, who once worked in Turkey’s counter-terrorism unit, suggested that the killings might have been ordered by the PKK leadership, pointing out that Ms Cansiz led a faction that had opposed Mr Ocalan’s peace moves in the past. But a Kurdish official in Paris, Eyup Doru, dismissed the claims and said that he was convinced that the Turkish government was responsible. “The work [these three women] were doing, attracting attention to repression by the Turkish authorities, doubtless embarrassed the [Ankara] government,” he said.

This theory was dismissed by French intelligence sources. “It’s difficult to imagine the Turkish state undertaking this kind of operation in France,” an internal security source told the newspaper Le Figaro. “Police and judicial cooperation is one area where Paris and Ankara get on reasonably well. It is unthinkable, even ridiculous, to believe that this was a Turkish undercover action.” Others pointed out, however, that extreme nationalist Turkish groups were active within the Turkish diaspora in France. The information office had been repeatedly identified by the Turkish community in Paris as a source of recruitment and fund-raising for the PKK.

The victims: Who was who

Sakine Cansiz

As a founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Sakine Cansiz was the first senior female member of the organisation. Cansiz led the Kurdish protest movement out of Turkey’s Diyarbakir prison in the 1980s, and worked with Ocalan in Syria after her release. She later served as a commander of the women’s guerrilla movement in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.

According to a US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, Cansiz had been in Paris since she was released from jail in Germany in 2007 – after Berlin turned down a Turkish request for her extradition – and became responsible for the PKK women’s movement in Europe.

Hurriyet, the Turkish daily newspaper, said Cansiz had been “known for her opposition to the alleged head of the PKK’s armed-wing, Syrian citizen Ferman Hussein”.

Fidan Dogan

The 32-year-old Paris representative of the Brussels-based Kurdistan National Congress (KNC) political group worked in the information centre, and was responsible for lobbying European Union diplomats on behalf of the PKK.

Leyla Soylemez

Described as a “young activist” for the Kurdistan National Congress, she is believed to have worked on diplomatic relations and as a women’s representative on behalf of the PKK.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-s-war-hits-streets-of-paris-8446533.html

January 11, 2013
Turkey condemns killing of Kurdish activists

Turkey has condemned the killing of three Kurdish women activists in Paris, calling the murders a “summary execution.”

Portraits of presumed victims are seen pinned on a member of the Kurdish community’s coat at they gather next to the entrance of the Information Centre of Kurdistan in Paris.

Portraits of presumed victims are seen pinned on a member of the Kurdish community’s coat at they gather next to the entrance of the Information Centre of Kurdistan in Paris. Photo: REUTERS

3:21PM GMT 10 Jan 2013

Bulent Arinc, a government spokesman, said the deaths were “carried out in the manner of a summary execution”.

“This is utterly wrong. I express my condolences,” he said.

His remarks came just hours after three Kurdish women, a co-founder of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and two other activists, were found shot dead in Paris early on Thursday, in what French authorities labelled an “assassination.”

Speaking from Senegal, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said it was “too soon to comment” but the incident could be a “provocation” coming at a time when peace talks between the state and the PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan were under way.

The slayings came as Turkey was holding peace talks with the group to try to persuade it to disarm. A Turkish lawmaker claimed the women were slain in a dispute between PKK factions, while some Kurdish protesters and a Kurdish lawmaker in Turkey claimed the Turkish government was involved.

Turkey’s Anadolu news agency identified one of the victims as Sakine Cansiz, a founding member of the PKK.

The conflict between the PKK and Turkish troops has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1984, when the rebels – who are seeking self-rule for Kurds in southeast Turkey – took up arms.

Manuel Valls, the French interior minister, who visited the pro-Kurdish centre in Paris where the bodies were found, said the deaths were “without doubt an execution.” He called it a “totally intolerable act.”

RTL radio reported that all three women were shot in the head, but French police would not immediately confirm the report.

Emotions mounted as hundreds of Kurds filled the street in Paris outside the Kurdistan Information Center. Police erected barricades to try to contain the crowd. Some people waved Kurdish flags while others chanted angrily against the Turkish government.

An online site for Kurdish youth called on all Kurds and “friends of Kurds to come to Paris.” The site, jeunessekurde.fr, showed three photos of the slain women. It identified the other two as Fidan Dogan, who reportedly was chief of the information centre, and Leyla Soylemez.

Kurds make up more than 20 per cent of Turkey’s 75 million people.

The three women were alone at the centre on Wednesday and were unreachable by telephone, said Leon Edart, an official of the Federation of Kurdish Associations of France.

In Turkey, Selahattin Demirtas, the leader of a Kurdish political party in Turkey’s parliament, called on the French government to shed light on the killings “without delay” and in a way that “leaves no room” for doubt.

“We want it to be known that that these assassinations which were carried in the busiest area of Paris cannot be covered up,” Demirtas said.

Huseyin Celik, the deputy chairman of Turkey’s ruling party, said the attack appeared to be the result of “an internal feud” within the PKK, but did not provide any evidence to back his statement.

Celik also suggested the slayings were an attempt to derail the peace talks.

The PKK does have a history of internal executions. While many Kurdish activists and militants were victims of extra-judicial killings blamed on Turkish government forces in the 1990s, it’s not known whether they also targeted any exiled Kurds in Europe.

In the streets of Paris, the protesters blamed Turkey.

“Where are French? Where is that solidarity? I think that the state of Turkey did this,” said one man in the Paris crowd, identifying himself only as Ali.

Turkey frequently accuses, France, Germany and the Netherlands – home to large numbers of Kurds from Turkey – of supporting the PKK, failing to extradite wanted militants and of not backing Turkey’s “fight against terrorism.”

Turkish officials say the PKK raises funds through extortion or other criminal activities in European countries that have a large number of Kurdish immigrants.

France has a large Kurdish community concentrated in the Paris region and French police have occasionally arrested Kurds suspected of illegally financing the PKK.

via Turkey condemns killing of Kurdish activists – Telegraph.

January 11, 2013