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Tag: PKK

  • U.S. diplomat in Ankara on Turkish-Kurdish talks

    U.S. diplomat in Ankara on Turkish-Kurdish talks

    PUKmedia       21-10-2008    19:12:55

    A top U.S. diplomat, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, has arrived at Turkish capital to hold talks with the country’s officials over the PKK problem and the developments of recent Turkish- Kurdish meetings, Turkish news agencies reported on Tuesday.

    Fried met the undersecretary of the foreign ministry, Ertugrul Apakan, CNNTurk reported.

    Bilateral U.S.- Turkish relations, the fight against PKK, as well as the new process in relations between Turkey and the “Kurdish regional administration in northern Iraq” are expected to be among the issues topping the agenda in the contacts, Turkish officials was quoted by the Media sources as saying.

    U.S provides Turkish military intelligence information on the whereabouts of PKK guerrillas in the mountainous Qandil on the border between Kurdistan region and Turkey, where PKK is believed to operate against the Turkish forces.

    Also, U.S has urged Ankara in the past to hold direct talks with KRG and Baghdad to discuss the problem of PKK, a call refused by Turkish government until the recent meeting of Kurdistan region president Masoud Barzani with Turkish special representative to Baghdad Murat Ozcelik.

    The visit comes hours after the Turkish foreign minister announced his country would start holding dialogue with U.S and Iraq to draw plans for ending PKK issue in “northern Iraq”

    Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said Monday Turkey is considering three-way consultations with Iraq and the United States for fresh measures to purge PKK bases in neighboring Iraq.

    He added this trilateral mechanism is not a format that can substitute bilateral mechanisms Turkey is separately carrying out with the United States and Iraq.

    Fried is expected to depart Turkey later in the day.

    Relevant to the newly building relations between Erbil and Ankara, PUK representative to Turkey on Monday revealed that a high level Turkish delegation would visit Erbil in a near future to hold talks with the Kurdish officials, as a completion to the previous meetings took place in Baghdad.

    Bahroz Gelali, PUK representative told Kurdistani Nwe newspaper the delegation may be headed by Turkish government representative Murat Ozcelik, but did not elaborate.

    -kurdsat.tv-

  • Terror in the mountains

    Terror in the mountains

    Terribly Misleading Economist Article on PKK Terror–Please Leave Your Comments

    ykundupoglu [[email protected]]

     

    Turkey and the Kurds

    Terror in the mountains

    Oct 16th 2008 | ANKARA, DIYARBAKIR AND KARS
    From The Economist print edition

    Renewed violence raises new questions about Turkey’s treatment of its Kurds

     

    HER boots caked in cow dung, her hands in soil, 80-year-old Xaje Artuget has but one regret. “I wish all eight of my sons had gone to fight in the mountains,” she sighs. In fact, “only one” joined the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and is now “somewhere in northern Iraq”. Similar feelings abound in many hardscrabble townships in eastern Turkey, where decades of repression and poverty have provided a steady stream of recruits since the PKK launched its violent campaign for independence in 1984.

    At least 44,000 people, mostly Kurds, have died in the conflict. The Turkish government says it has spent some $300 billion battling the terrorists. The results have been mixed. The PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured in 1999, and several ceasefires followed. Yet the violence continues today—17 Turkish soldiers were killed in early October when some 400 PKK rebels raided a military outpost in Hakkari province, near the Iraqi border, and days later rebels killed four policemen in Diyarbakir. Sympathy for the PKK remains strong among Turkey’s 14m Kurds.

    The Turkish parliament has now extended the army’s mandate to bomb PKK targets in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, and Turkish aircraft have been doing just that. Yet the latest wave of PKK attacks has embarrassed the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and raised new questions about the army’s competence. The cries of incompetence grew louder when Taraf, a newspaper, published a leaked internal report showing that the army knew about the planned attack in Hakkari but did little to stop it. It did not help when the air-force chief was photographed playing golf a day later.

    In an alarming twist, ethnic tensions are erupting in western parts of Turkey as well. Two people died in the town of Altinova recently when a Kurdish youth rammed a truck into a group of Turks who were taunting Kurds by playing loud nationalist tunes. The army was called in when Kurdish homes and businesses came under siege.

    The Kurds remain a huge problem for Turkey’s government. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, raised hopes in 2005 when he said the state had “made mistakes” in handling them. Steps to ease bans on Kurdish broadcasting and education followed, and vast sums were poured into Kurdish regions. The handouts included education subsidies for the poor, especially for girls. These helped the AKP to clobber the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in much of the south-east in the July 2007 election. Yet to many the measures smell of vote-buying. “I haven’t received a penny for my girls’ schooling since April,” complains Sabiha Celik in Sason. “I will never vote for the AKP again.”

    Indeed, Kurdish support for the AKP has been fading ever since the government yielded to army pressure to resume cross-border operations against the PKK in northern Iraq. The generals are baying for a freer hand, prompting worries of a return to the human-rights abuses of the 1990s. Ominously, the Turkish Human Rights Foundation says that, this year alone, over 30 people have been killed in alleged police violence, mostly in the Kurdish region. The government had to apologise when Engin Ceber, a left-wing activist, was tortured and beaten to death by security forces recently in an Istanbul prison.

    AKP leaders, who narrowly escaped a constitutional court ban in July, have yet to utter a word about a similar closure case that is pending against the DTP on the ground that it is propagating separatism. DTP deputies spend lots of time lobbying for better prison conditions for Mr Ocalan. Many of them were handpicked by the PKK to run for parliament. Yet just as in the AKP case, much of the prosecution’s argument rests on words rather than deeds. Moreover, any ban might just boost the DTP’s popularity.

    Turkey blames some of its Kurdish woes on the West. “We are still seeing co-operation with the PKK, they are doing fund-raising in EU countries and there are many PKK terrorists living in Europe. This really bothers us,” Ali Babacan, the foreign minister, claimed in an interview with The Economist. Similar harangues at the Americans have subsided since they agreed to let the Turks pursue the PKK in Iraq.

    There are some hopeful signs that Turkey is trying to make friends with the Iraqi Kurds. This week Turkish diplomats met Masoud Barzani, who heads the Kurdish regional government in Iraq. This has prompted speculation that Turkey could be thinking of reviving an amnesty for PKK fighters untainted by violence. As the winter cold sets in, many might be tempted. And, as Mr Babacan acknowledges, “a military solution is not a solution.”

     

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  • TDN: A clear and almost-present danger: ethnic conflict

    TDN: A clear and almost-present danger: ethnic conflict

    TDN den bir yazi.

    Thursday, October 9, 2008
    MUSTAFA AKYOL
      BELFAST – When you stroll down the streets of this city, you see how painful and enduring an ethnic conflict can be. Despite the recent peace process, which brought an end to the decades-old war between Catholics and Protestants, the bitterness is still very much alive. There are “peace walls” in around 80 different spots of Belfast, which divide the neighbors who abhor each other simply for who each other are. In order to avoid the stones thrown off the walls, some houses are protected with barbed wires.
      Much can be read from the murals on the walls. In a Protestant neighborhood, these eye-catching paintings tell how horrible the Catholics, and even Catholicism itself, is. “There will be no peace in Ireland,” Oliver Cromwell reportedly once said, “until the Catholic Church is crushed.” What is shivering is that this historical quote from the 17th century is very much relevant to our day in the minds of the radical Protestants of North Ireland.
     
    Turkishess vs Kurdishness?:
      The mood is not too different on the other side of the wall. Catholic neighborhoods are full of murals that denounce “British imperialism” or plates that honor their brethren who were killed by British bullets. My taxi driver, whose Catholicism is as unmistakable as his strong Ulster accent, tells me how “those Protestant killers” tormented his community for decades.
      Sometimes people, especially secularists, interpret the case of Northern Ireland as a “religious conflict” — a relic from the pre-Enlightenment age where religion mattered too much. But actually it is a secular conflict in which the apparently religious identity is in fact an ethnic one. A famous joke summarizes it all: Somebody in North Ireland responds to a survey question about religious affiliation by declaring himself an atheist. “Would that be a Protestant atheist,” comes the insistent reply, “or a Catholic atheist?” It is really ethnicity that divides here, not theology.
      Much more needs to be said about North Ireland, to be sure, but I will just focus on what is relevant for Turkey. The drama in the former case points to a very important lesson: Ethnic conflict can well arise in a modern and wealthy nation. This is crucial, because for decades, the Turkish intelligentsia, especially the political left, argued that the problem in Turkey’s Southeast was that the region was not modernized and developed enough. The terrorism of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, they argued, was a result of the pre-modern “feudal” social structure of the Kurdish populace.
      But the truth was quite the opposite. In fact the PKK was, and still is, a very “modern” organization. It is actually a revolt against not just the Turkish state, but also the Kurdish tradition. The recent news story on CNN International by reporter Arwa Damon, which has caused great uproar in the Turkish media saying it whitewashes the PKK, is actually right on the mark: This terrorist group is also a “progressive” one, which claims to “liberate women” and transform the society. Yet, of course, while it is “liberating” women from the male-dominated Kurdish culture, it is turning them into apparatchiks of a rigid ideology. Traditional obedience out; modern servitude in.
      Which brings us to a sobering fact: Modernity is not always a good thing. All totalitarians, from Hitler to Stalin, were modernizers. So even are most radical Islamists: They use modern means to achieve a modern political program. And, of course, all nationalists are a part of modernity. Nationalism is actually a product of modernity itself. Until the 19th century, the most important identity for most people, was religion. In Turkish lands, for example, the question “Who are you?” would be given a common answer: “Thank God, I am a Muslim.” With modernity came Turkishness and Kurdishness, and the conflict between them.
     

    No easy way out:
      What this means is that Turkey will not be able to solve its Kurdish question by simply modernizing itself. Better infrastructure or “education” in the Southeast are good goals in themselves, but they will not resolve the ethnic problem. The PKK was founded by university graduates who became more ethnically conscious precisely thanks to that education. While their fathers were calling themselves “Muslims” first, they started to call themselves “Kurds” and “revolutionaries.”
      This also means that the Kurdish question will be the most fatal one for Turkey in the next few decades. The secularist-Islamic divide, the other main axis in this country, will be softened by the advancement of modernity: Conservative Muslims are actually becoming more and more like the secularists in the way they live. (Even their ways of corruption are becoming very similar.) But the ethnic consciousness in society is rising in a very dangerous way. After every act of terrorism by the PKK, Kurdish neighborhoods in big cities become targets of rage. Thank God nothing horrible has happened yet. But it might, and the PKK is deliberately provoking it.
      In the past, right-wing hotheads in Turkish streets could be rallied only against the “infidels” — which could include the unorthodox Alevis too. But now, Kurds are becoming the main targets. For that they are not fellow Muslims anymore; they are a distinct ethnic group.
      The only way out of this dilemma can be to retain the good aspects of tradition, such as the sense of Muslim fraternity, while embracing the good aspects of modernity, such as liberal democracy. Whether Turkey will be able to that is the million-dollar question.
    © 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr

  • PKK assault draws condemnation from European Union and NATO

    PKK assault draws condemnation from European Union and NATO

         
    Monday, 06 October 2008

    A bloody attack perpetrated by the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on Friday against a military outpost in southeastern Turkey has drawn harsh reactions from the EU and NATO.The French presidency of the Council of the European Union on Saturday condemned the attack staged by PKK terrorists against a military outpost, Aktütün, in the Şemdinli district in the eastern province of Hakkari that killed 15 soldiers and wounded 21 others. A press release issued by the presidency said the EU was in complete solidarity with Turkish officials and offered condolences to the families and relatives of the slain soldiers. “The EU expresses its entire solidarity with the Turkish authorities and presents its condolences to the families and relatives of the victims. …

    The EU is resolutely at the side of Turkey in its fight against the PKK, an organization on the European list of terrorist groups and entities,” the statement read. EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana also condemned the attack and said he shared Turkey’s grief. “I condemn in the strongest possible terms the attack against Turkish troops in the Southeast of Turkey in which at least 15 Turkish soldiers were killed. I convey my sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wish to express my sympathy and solidarity to the Turkish authorities,” he said.

    NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer also issued a press release condemning the attack and said NATO allies were in strong solidarity with Turkey in its fight against terrorism.
  • The Turkish alliance Anti-terrorist efforts and dividends

    The Turkish alliance Anti-terrorist efforts and dividends

    Tulin Daloglu
    Tuesday, October 7, 2008

     
    Last week, the House stumbled before passing the bailout bill. But in the end, its way was eased by the overwhelming bipartisan approval of the Senate, which gave Treasury Secretary Hanry Paulson what he wanted, more or less. Whether it’s the best solution to the financial crisis is open to debate. Clearly, there is a kind of connection between the war in Iraq and the tumultuous markets. In this election season, the $600 billion already spent in Iraq and the ongoing $10 billion a month being spent there is under increased scrutiny.
     
    But historically, the financial cost of a military action has never affected American will on the battlefield. “The antiwar people in Vietnam constantly talked about how much it was costing,” said John Mueller of Ohio State University at a recent event at the Brookings Institution. “But it’s basically blood that matters, actually being killed.” As the loss of American lives in Iraq significantly declined since the surge, Mr. Mueller argued, Americans’ approval or disapproval becomes less relevant; the people are able to tolerate it. “And so it may very well be that John McCain is right when he says we can stay there 100 years,” Mr. Mueller said. “Basically, if Americans aren’t being killed, no one cares in the least where they are.”
     
    The key issue about the war is neither the monetary cost nor whether or not going to war was the right decision. There is no bringing back the more than 4,000 American lives or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost. Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain differ on how they would end the war. Neither of their plans can assure the outcome. But the other countries of the region have no choice but to bear the burdens that the war has created there.
     
    Turkey, for example, is a NATO ally of the United States – which has been attacked by Kurdish separatist terrorists who have found safe heaven in Iraq. Last week, the PKK once again attacked a Turkish border post, killing 15 Turkish soldiers. The funerals were held all over the country and broadcast live on Sunday, marking the end of Eid in this Muslim country and bringing together hundreds of thousands to pray for those lost in the attack. Such funerals have been seen in Turkish living rooms for more than 15 years now. Turks are fed up with this war; more than 30,000 of their people have been lost, and there is no end is in sight.
     
    Occasionally, there are arguments about the cost of fighting terrorism. If there were peace, that money could be spent in the Kurdish areas, where the PKK attacks most often. It’s the same as the American arguments about what the money spent in Iraq could have funded. The Turkish state surely has not always fought the separatist Kurdish terrorists with the right tools. They refused to acknowledge the Kurdish reality for too long. Yet if this trouble were to require solely domestic solutions, the situation could be less discombobulated today.
     
    Historically, the Western powers wanted to build an independent Kurdistan from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire – and that continues to haunt modern Turkey. Vahit Erdem, a member of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), told me in a recent interview in his Turkish Parliament office that the initial U.S. intention was to establish an independent Kurdish state. “But in time they saw it would create more trouble in the region than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [and] the U.S. changed its position,” Mr. Erdem said. “Now it sincerely supports Iraqi territorial integrity. In the beginning, they were – frankly – not supporting it.” Turkish public opinion has not yet been convinced, though.
     
    Now, as the region watches the U.S. presidential election, it isn’t clear which candidate would be more sympathetic. Both candidates have pros and cons. But it’s clear that while the debate in Ankara focuses on stabilizing Iraq, continued cross-border PKK attacks on Turkey raise the possibility that Turkey will launch a major incursion into Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists. While the United States calls for restraint, it launches raids into Pakistan’s tribal beltway for the same reason: to pursue terrorists that carry attacks into Afghanistan. This is an incredible double standard. It would be wise for the United States to physically go after the PKK terrorists in the Iraqi territories.
     
    While an independent Kurdistan will not be built by a rogue Kurdish terrorist group, a possible Turkish offensive which may not be limited to air strikes will halt Turkey’s accession talks with the European Union and strain its relationship with the United States. Then Turkey will be totally lost.
     
    While it will take years to stabilize Iraq, the United States needs Turkey for the foreseeable future to protect its national interests.
     
    Tulin Daloglu is a free-lance writer
  • TURKEY SEARCHES FOR A PLAN B AFTER PKK ATTACK

    TURKEY SEARCHES FOR A PLAN B AFTER PKK ATTACK

    By Gareth Jenkins

    Monday, October 6, 2008

     

    The large death toll in the recent attack by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on a Turkish military outpost close to the border with Iraq has dealt a major psychological blow to the Turkish government and severely damaged the prestige of the Turkish military, which has long been arguing that the PKK is a spent force.

    On the afternoon of October 3, a large force of PKK militants, probably several hundred strong (Hurriyet, October 4), attacked a Turkish military outpost in the village of Aktutun (Bezele in Kurdish), approximately 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) from Turkey’s border with Iraq. On October 4 the Turkish General Staff (TGS) announced that 15 Turkish soldiers had been killed in the attack and 23 wounded. Another two soldiers were missing and presumed dead. The TGS put the PKK death toll at 23 (TGS Press Statement NO: BA – 42 / 08, TGS website, www.tsk.mil.tr). On October 6 the PKK issued a statement claiming to be in possession of the corpses of the two missing soldiers (Agence France Presse, October 6).

    The Turkish death toll was the highest in a single incident since June 2004, when the PKK returned to violence after a five-year ceasefire. On October 5 hundreds of thousands of Turks took to the streets across Turkey for the funerals of the soldiers whose bodies had been recovered. Turkish newspapers devoted pages to photographs of weeping mothers and inconsolable little children clinging to coffins draped with the Turkish flag. The photographs left little doubt that almost all of the dead, most of them conscripts performing their military service, came once again from the rural and small-town poor of Anatolia, who have borne the brunt of Turkey’s 24-year-old war with the PKK.

    For most Turks, the emotional trauma was exacerbated by a sense of shock. In recent months, the Turkish army’s casualties have tended to come in ones and twos, mostly as the result of remote-controlled mines. As a result, many Turks had finally begun to believe the repeated statements by their politicians and generals that the PKK was in retreat; not least as a consequence of the frequent Turkish air raids against PKK camps and bases in northern Iraq.

    On October 5, in one of the most detailed press briefings ever given by a serving member of the Turkish high command, Deputy Chief of Staff General Hasan Igsiz told journalists that the military units in Aktutun had successfully repulsed what he claimed was a PKK attempt to overrun the outpost (Radikal, Milliyet, Vatan, October 6).

    From a purely military perspective, there is an element of truth both in Igsiz’s assertion of a military success and the TGS’s claims that the air raids against the PKK camps and mountains in northern Iraq have forced the organization onto the defensive and reduced its operational capabilities inside Turkey. Ever since it resumed its insurgency in June 2004, however, the PKK has essentially been waging a psychological rather than a military war, using violence as part of a campaign of psychological and emotional attrition in the hope of eventually convincing the Turkish authorities that the organization cannot be destroyed by military means and that the only solution is to enter into a political dialogue. From this perspective, the attack on Aktutun was undoubtedly a major victory for the PKK.

    It is also unlikely to have been a coincidence that the attack occurred only a few days before the Turkish parliament is due to convene on October 8 to renew the one-year mandate allowing the Turkish military to conduct cross-border operations against the PKK in Iraq. The PKK will undoubtedly now feel that it has demonstrated to both its supporters and its enemies that the cross-border raids have failed to destroy it.

    For many Turks, some of the details of the firefight provided by Igsiz have also raised questions about the military’s capabilities. Igsiz claimed that the Turkish military’s thermal imaging equipment first picked up the presence of PKK militants moving toward the Turkish border at 5:00 A.M., triggering an artillery bombardment of their suspected positions and forcing them to launch their attack during daylight. Yet, even though the Turkish military was able to call in reinforcements, including additional commando units, two F-16s, and four helicopter gunships, the firefight still continued through the afternoon and into the evening, when the surviving PKK militants were apparently able to withdraw under cover of darkness (Radikal, Milliyet, Vatan, October 6).

    Perhaps more damagingly for the TGS, the assault of October 3 was the 38th time the military outpost in Aktutun had been attacked by the PKK in the last 20 years, resulting in the deaths of 44 soldiers, most recently on May 9 when six Turkish soldiers were killed (Milliyet, Hurriyet, May 10). Videos taken by the PKK and subsequently posted on the YouTube video-sharing website reinforce how vulnerable the outpost was to attack. They show militants deployed on the surrounding hills firing from heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, and mortars into what is clearly, in military terms, an indefensible position (www.youtube.com). On October 5 Igsiz admitted that a decision had been made in 2007 to relocate the outpost but that its implementation had been postponed because of what he claimed were insufficient funds. It is an explanation that is unlikely to satisfy many Turks. On October 5 Igsiz announced that five particularly vulnerable outposts, including Aktutun, would now be relocated to more defensible positions (Anadolu Ajansi, October 5).

    In addition to severely damaging the prestige of the TGS, the attack on Aktutun has also left the civilian government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a dilemma. When he heard of the attack, Erdogan cut short an official visit to Central Asia and returned to Turkey, vowing to do whatever was necessary to eradicate the PKK (NTV, October 4). On October 4 Turkish warplanes once again bombed suspected PKK targets in northern Iraq (TGS Information Note No. BN – 91/ 08 of October 5, www.tsk.mil.tr). More air raids can be expected in the days and weeks ahead. The problem for both Erdogan and the TGS is that after the attack of October 3, many Turks will need a lot of convincing that such measures are having any impact.