Ankara, June 18: Mounting Kurdish rebel violence in Turkey and the military response fed fears Friday that a government bid for a peaceful end to the 25-year conflict is in its death throes.
The army said at least 130 members of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) had been killed inside Turkey and in an air raid on rebel hideouts in neighbouring Iraq since violence flared anew in March, adding it had lost 43 personnel.
The military expects the PKK to further intensify and spread its attacks, General Fahri Kir said Friday. The rebels have in the past bombed civilian targets in western Turkey, including tourist resorts.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the PKK sought to undermine a government initiative to boost Kurdish freedoms and investment in the impoverished southeast in a bid to peacefully end the conflict.
The so-called “Kurdish opening,” announced last year, has already faltered amid an opposition outcry that Ankara is bowing to the PKK, as well as persistent rebel attacks and a judicial onslaught on Kurdish activists.
Ankara rejects dialogue with the PKK, which it lists as a terrorist group.
“In spite of terrorism, we will insist on democracy… We are taking all risks… to stop the deaths of youths and the tears of mothers,” Erdogan told a meeting of his Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Analysts played down any prospect of peace at a time when PKK attacks have fuelled public hostility to reform ahead of general elections next year.
“The chance for an opening to silence the guns… no longer exists,” columnist Derya Sazak wrote in the Milliyet daily.
In a symbolic development Thursday, judges ordered the arrest of several PKK militants who surrendered in October in a gesture of support for Ankara’s reform pledges.
In an unusually lenient procedure, the militants were initially allowed to walk free and were greeted with mass pro-PKK demonstrations in the southeast that proved a major embarassment for Erdogan.
Rusen Cakir, an analyst specialising on the Kurdish issue, said the militants’ surrender was organised with government approval, and their arrest signalled that Ankara had now abandoned its perceived if undeclared intention to include the PKK into peace efforts.
PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, serving a life sentence since 1999, said through his lawyers last month he was giving up efforts to seek dialogue with the government, leaving PKK commanders in charge of the conflict.
Police have rounded up hundreds of Kurds since last year as part of a probe into an alleged urban wing of the PKK.
Prosecutors are soon likely to bring terror-related charges against some 150 people, among them popular Kurdish figures.
Ankara, in the meantime, has moved to mend fences with Iraqi Kurds, long accused of tolerating PKK bases on their soil, and won a pledge this month by their leader Massud Barzani for “all efforts” to curb the rebels.
Erdogan’s government has made some notable gestures to the Kurds, including the inauguration of a Kurdish-language television channel last year.
The “Kurdish opening” however has failed to produce any concrete results besides the abolition of a ban on speaking Kurdish in prisons.
—-Agencies