Turkish Jets Kill 35 People After Vows of More Kurds’ Rights
January 11, 2012, 9:24 AM ESTBy Emre Peker
(Updates with Erdogan’s efforts to end Kurdish unrest starting in first paragraph.)
Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Turkish jets killed 35 people in the southeast, underlining a dual challenge that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces in pushing ahead with efforts to end Kurdish unrest through reforms while also fighting terrorism.
More than 20 people were also wounded and the count is increasing, said Hasip Kaplan, a parliamentarian with the pro- Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP. The jets bombed Ortasu village in the Uludere district, killing smugglers who were operating along the border with Iraq, he said in a phone interview from Sirnak. Turkey’s military said it’s investigating the airstrikes.
The attack follows statements last week by two deputy prime ministers who said the government must recognize the Kurdish identity, give the country’s biggest ethnic minority constitutional and cultural rights and change legal criteria for what constitutes terrorism to allow some forms of amnesty to members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. More than 40,000 people have died since fighting between the group and Turkey started in 1984.
Turkey’s National Security Council said operations against the PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union, will “continue with determination” after a meeting in Ankara yesterday. The PKK staged its deadliest attacks since the 1990s in October, killing more than 30 soldiers, policemen and state-employed militia in the southeast.
Military Intelligence
The air force struck the region on the Iraqi border for about one hour starting at 9:37 p.m. last night, the military General Staff in Ankara said today in a statement on its website. The bombing followed images transmitted from drones of a group crossing into Turkey, the military said. The area is frequently used by the PKK, and the army had intelligence of a planned attack on its troops, according to the statement.
Turkey has killed at least 150 PKK members in air and artillery bombardments since August, according to the military.
Erdogan’s office and the interior and justice ministries haven’t returned his calls, BDP’s Kaplan said. He accused the Turkish media of ignoring the bombings. Officials from the premier’s press office and the ministries said no one was available to comment when contacted by Bloomberg.
Companies including Petrol Ofisi AS, Turkey’s biggest fuel retailer and a unit of OMV AG, have complained that smuggling from northern Iraq, where the PKK keeps a command center in the Kandil Mountains, provides unfair competition.
‘Clearly a Massacre’
“This is clearly a massacre,” Kaplan said. “No one is answering their phones, the government has outright closed off communications with us.”
The BDP said its co-heads, lawmakers Gulten Kisanak and Selahattin Demirtas, are travelling to Sirnak via Diyarbakir.
“This is a call to everyone in the media and those who want to protect human dignity: Don’t be complicit in this massacre with your silence,” Demirtas said today via his official Twitter Inc. account.
Sirnak’s governorship confirmed that 35 people had died and said one person was wounded during last night’s strike in an e- mailed statement today.
‘Democratic Opening’
Erdogan, who ordered airstrikes after an August attack and sent Turkish troops into northern Iraq to hunt down PKK members, recently approved proposals to renew his government’s so-called democratic opening of 2009.
The initial measures include faster prosecution of people accused of terrorism, said Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, who is leading the effort. Also among the steps are ending long pre-trial imprisonments and lifting arrest warrants on those members of the PKK who voluntarily surrender and disarm, Sabah newspaper reported Dec. 27, without saying how it got the information.
Turkish policies of assimilation in the past resulted in a ban on the Kurdish language, torture in jails, death lists and murders by unknown assailants, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told the Ankara parliament on Dec. 21.
“We have to respect a person living in Turkey who says, ‘I’m Kurdish and I’m proud of my identity,’” the deputy prime minister said. “We have to accept this.”
Arinc said the expression of non-Turkish ethnic identities shouldn’t be treated as terrorism. His comments followed the arrest of 48 people during raids Dec. 20 at 10 news organizations as part of an investigation into the Union of Communities in Kurdistan, or KCK, which prosecutors say is the PKK. A court in Istanbul jailed 35 of the people pending trial.
Turkey has detained more than 3,500 people and put 7,500 under surveillance in its investigation of the KCK, the BDP said in October.
--With assistance from Steve Bryant in Ankara. Editors: Digby Lidstone, James Hertling.
To contact the reporter on this story: Emre Peker in Ankara at epeker2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Louis Meixler at lmeixler@bloomberg.net
