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| Turkey brings Kurdish peace plan to parliament |
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
ANKARA: The Turkish government will on Tuesday set out to lawmakers its vision on ending a deadly 25-year Kurdish insurgency — a project that opposition parties say amounts to giving in to “terrorists” and undermining the country’s unity.
Interior Minister Besir Atalay is expected to present a general view of the so-called National Unity Project when parliament convenes for an initial discussion at 1300 GMT. A second-round discussion on Thursday will see Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan address lawmakers.
Since August, the government has been trying to build support for its initiative to give wider rights to the country’s estimated 12-million-strong Kurds and thus get the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to lay down arms.
The project appeared headed for trouble last month when a group of PKK rebels from the group’s mountain stronghold in northern Iraq surrendered to Turkey in a gesture of support for the government plan and were detained and freed shortly afterwards.
Although Erdogan initially hailed the group’s arrival as a boost to his plan, the subsequent hero’s welcome organised for the rebels by thousands of Kurds chanting pro-PKK slogans unleashed anger across the country, prompting the government to halt the arrival of a second group. Opposition parties have launched scathing attacks on the government for caving in to the PKK which has been fighting for self-rule in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.
“They have carried the bloody murderers of the terrorist PKK on their shoulders... This process aims to pardon the PKK and release” its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan,” Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party said at the weekend, charging that the plan would break up the country. Deniz Baykal, the leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, on the other hand, said the government’s plan had hurt relatives of soldiers killed in the conflict.
“Won’t the mothers of our heroes, our martyrs now ask ‘why did I send my son to die’?,” he said last week.
Ankara has so far remained tight-lipped on its initiative, but media reports suggest measures may include lifting restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language, allowing the return of 12,000 Turkish Kurds currently in a camp in Iraq and investing several million dollars to tackle poverty and unemployment in the southeast.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
