Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Özeti
work.
"Thanks to the soldiers, we 're going
to open the coal mine again, and maybe
even get a paved road, " said the village
chief, Nadir Yaman, who has two wives
and 18 children. "Maybe a few people
from this area were tricked into joining
the PKK, but no one supports them any
more. The PKK is a terror and murder
group."
But about 200 kilometers (about 120
miles) northwest of Caliskan lies the
village of Gumusorgu.
Rumors have been circulating
through the surrounding countryside
that something awful may have
happened there. Some say soldiers
burned the village or forcibly evacuated
it or committed some kind of atrocity
there.
A reporter who tried to reach Gumusorgu
this week was arrested, taken
to a military prison in Batman, the provincial
capital, and interrogated for seven
hours by angry government agents
who accused him of spying for the
Kurdish rebels.
Part of the proof they cited was a
restaurant receipt they found in his
pocket indicating that he had met with a
representative of a group with the
phrase "human rights" in its name. ,
One agent described Gumusorgu an~
two other villages that the reporter had
hoped to visit as "PKK villages." Another
said Batman Province and neighboring
Siirt Province were infested by
the rebels.
"They're all over the place!" he
shouted. "We can't go out at night. The
PKK is everywhere around here. "
Is the war proceeding as it looks from
Caliskan, with the army in firm control
and local Kurds grateful that life is
returning to normal? Or is it the way it
looks from around Gumusorgu, where
soldiers seem far from victory and rumors
.of repJ:ession spread unchecked
over the high hills?
A six-day tour of southeastern Turkey
suggests that the army has dealt
powerful blows to the rebel. group,
killing many guerrillas and forcmg most
of the rest across the border to sanctuaries
in Iran, Iraq and Syria. Many
villages once tom by conflict are now at
peace. .
But throughout the regIon, many
Kurds still resent the government's refusal
to accept their ethnic identity.
With Kurdish newsr.apers closed,
Kurdish politicians in jatl and hundreds
of Kurdish civilians murdered by mysterious
death squads, the Kurdish Workers
Party is the only surviving organization
that upholds the concept of
Kurdish identity.
"People are not for the PKK, because
the PKK kills children and schoolteachers
and commits all kinds of violence,"
said a university student in Diyarbakir,
the largest city in the region. "But there
is a certain sympathy, because we share
the same blood.
"We want to be able to express
ourselves as Kurds, with books and
newspapers and radio and television stations,
" the student said. ,. What the government
has done makes us think they
are against any peaceful Kurdish movement."
As many as one-fourth of the 60
million people in Turkeyare fully or
partly Kurdish, tracing their lineage
back to tribes that have lived in this
region for more than 2,000 years.
Kurds have never had a state of their
own, and today not only the Turkish
government but also the governments of
Iran, Iraq and Syria, all of which have
substantial Kurdish populations, strenuously
oppose efforts to create one on
their territory.
The group leading that effort is the
Kurdish Workers Party, tapping a deep
strain of Kurdish natIonalism that has
persisted since the founding of the Turkish
Republic 73 years ago.
The first evidently organized Turkish
response to the rebels was a campaign of
murder and kidnapping that has killed
hundreds or perhaps thousands of Kurdish
nationalists since 1991.
This wave of killings effectively decapitated
the Kurdish elite in southeastern
Turkey. It mayalso have
crippled the rebels' efforts to build an
organized base among civilians.
The next blow against the rebels was
struck by the army, which beginning in
1993 flooded southeastern provinces
with hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
They have overwhelmed the rebels;
who probably never had more than
10,000 guerrillas.
Army intelligence officers say they
believe that fewer than 3,000 guerrillas
remain inside Turkey, with perhaps an
additional 4,000 encamped in neigh.
boring countries.
Published estimates suggest that the
war against the Kurdish rebels costs
Turkey $7 billion to $8 billion a year.
Despite that cost, despite the social
upheaval caused by the hundreds of
thousands of Kurds who have abandoned
their villages voluntarily or on
orders from the army, and despite the.
political price that Turkey has had to
pay for the accusations of human-rights
violations that have been lodged against
it in Europe and the rest of the world,
most Turks seem to believe that their
leaders have no alternative.
"Turks have never forgotten how the
West tried to dismantle the Ottoman
Empire," said liter Turan, a political
scientist at Koc University in Istanbul.
"They see the PKK as ,trying to cut
away a part of Turkey to create a separate
state, and they don't tolerate
that. "
1-L1::Ll:LB'
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Northern Iraqi
peace committee
to hold first session
Ankara- Turkish Daily News
The participants at Tuesday's
meeting will attempt to take
the necessary steps for
building confidence between
the parties and implementing
the Ankara agreement,
including the principles of
sharing border revenues and
coordination between the two
administrations in the region
• With tension in northern Iraq
increasing rapidly, a high-level coordination
committee will come
together in Ankara on Tuesday to
discuss the northern Iraqi peace
movement.
. The committee, made up of representatives
of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK), the Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP), and the
Turkmen Front, will look at how
exactly to implement the agreemem
reached between the parties in
Ankara on Jan. 15.
According to one source, the participants
at Tuesday's meeting will
attempt "to take the necessary steps
for building confidence between the
parties, for reconciliation, and implementing
the Ankara agreement,
including the principles of sharing
border revenues and coordination
between the two administrations in
thè region."
The sponsors of the meeting,
Britain, the United States and
Turkey, are expected to urge for the
establishment of a temporary united
regional government which would
be responsible for holding elections.
At the moment the PUK and the
KDP each have a separate
Parliament.
The PUK will be represented
by a
delegation headed by Fouad
Masoum and which includes Shazad
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