Turkey, October 20: Turkey on Tuesday hailed the “surrender” of Kurdish rebels in support of plans to end the 25-year conflict, although rebel commanders insisted they would fight on.
The war of words came after a Kurdish “peace group” of militants and supporters crossed the Habur border gate from Iraq on Monday carrying a list of proposals to end the violence and Turkish authorities questioned them.
Speaking in Ankara, Interior Minister Besir Atalay welcomed the group’s arrival as a boost to Ankara’s two-pronged plan to expand Kurdish freedoms and keep the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) under military pressure.
“We expect these (surrenders) to continue. Let me underline that the (PKK) fighters in the mountains see that their way is a dead-end,” Atalay was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying.
Atalay argued that northern Iraq, where the PKK has rear bases, was ceasing to be a safe haven for the militants through Turkish military operations and cooperation with Iraqi authorities, adding: “We expect 100 or 150 people to return in small groups.”
But the PKK countered that its militants would not lay down arms and turn themselves in unless Turkey officially granted them political rights.
A senior rebel commander said the group that crossed from Iraq were not rebels who had abandoned the struggle, but envoys sent to convey Kurdish demands for a solution.
“This group should not be arrested and they should be respected… If the Turkish state does not arrest them and does not prevent them from expressing themselves, they would help the solution of the problem,” Cemil Bayik was quoted by the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency as saying.
Bayik also underlined that PKK militants would not give up their armed struggle.
Since August, the government has been trying to build public support for a raft of reforms to expand Kurds’ freedoms, but it has also vowed to pursue military action against the PKK, which it considers a terrorist organisation.
Ankara has called on the rebels to turn themselves in and categorically rejected proposals to negotiate with the PKK for a solution.
On Monday, thousands of Kurds shouting slogans in favour of peace had greeted the PKK’s 34-strong “peace group” who were immediately detained for questioning upon arrival.
Twenty-nine of them were initially released, while prosecutors asked a court to charge five with unspecified crimes committed in the past, judicial sources said.
The judge, however, released the remaining five as well on account of the fact that they had returned to Turkey of their own free will, the sources added.
The “peace group” included eight PKK rebels and 26 Turkish Kurds from the UN-run Makhmour refugee camp in northern Iraq which houses some 12,000 people who fled Turkey in the 1990s at the peak of the conflict.
More than 45,000 people have been killed since 1984 when the PKK picked up arms for self-rule in Turkey’s southeast.
—Agencies