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Turkey indicated it would bow to international
pressure to retry the Kurdish rebel Abdullah Ocalan
yesterday, after the European court of human rights
ruled that his original trial had not been
independent or impartial.
Attempting to head off a domestic political storm,
the Turkish prime minister declared that the man
reviled as a terrorist would not be allowed to walk
free.
"Whether this dossier is reopened or not, the matter
[of Ocalan's guilt] is a closed one for the nation's
conscience," the prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, said during a trip to Hungary.
The Strasbourg court ruled that the presence of a
military prosecutor at the trial, and the eight days
Ocalan spent alone in custody beforehand, were in
breach of European conventions Turkey has signed.
Ocalan, the head of the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK),
was enemy number one in Turkey before he was
captured and condemned to death for treason in 1999.
The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment three
years later.
Desperate to inject new impetus into its flagging
efforts to get an accession date from the European
Union in October, Turkey has little choice but to
call a retrial.
The country's leaders have battled against the
involvement of the European court from the start.
But, faced with a national outcry, they were doing
their best to play down the consequences of the
ruling yesterday.
"The Turkish republic is a state based on the rule
of law and will undertake the procedures required by
the law," said Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, a senior
member of the ruling Justice and Development party.
"Even if [Ocalan] were retried a hundred times, he
would get the same sentence," the foreign minister,
Abdullah Gul, said this week.
The justice minister, Cemil Cicek, said: "We must be
as cold-blooded as possible. This is not the end of
the world. Our people must not be concerned, they
must trust the state and the judiciary."
Such words are unlikely to reassure ordinary Turks,
most of whom share the Turkish media's view of
Ocalan as a "baby killer". After 15 years of war
with the PKK between 1984 and 1999 in which 37,000
people were killed, the hatred runs deep. Several
Kurdish politicians were put on trial last summer
simply for calling Ocalan "Mr".
Violence is on the increase again in Turkey's mainly
Kurdish south-east after the PKK's decision last
summer to end the ceasefire Ocalan called after his
capture. In one of the largest clashes, three
soldiers and more than 20 militants were killed last
month in a shootout near the mountain town of Siirt.
Intelligence officials say evidence is growing that
the PKK is planning bomb attacks on western Turkish
cities.
The Turkish government is struggling to contain a
wave of anger sparked in March when a group of
youths tried to desecrate the Turkish flag at
Kurdish new year celebrations in the southern city
of Mersin.
Throughout the PKK war, EU insistence on Kurdish
rights was seen by many Turks as indistinguishable
from support for the PKK.
Hilmi Ozkok, the army's chief of staff, said the PKK
was "dictating its demands in the guise of cultural
rights with the EU acting as intermediary".
A week before the ruling, Mr Erdogan had accused
"elements in the west" of using the Kurdish issue to
"divide Turkey". The fear underlying these
statements, observers say, is that Ocalan could use
a retrial as an opportunity to publicise the Kurdish
cause, something he failed to do in 1999.
Most believe a strong response by the government
should enable it to ride out the storm. The
technique worked last year when the European court
of human rights ordered a retrial of imprisoned
Kurdish politician Leyla Zana and her three
colleagues.
But Turkey has a problem it did not have then. While
the constitution acknowledges the supremacy of
international law, since 2003 the country's law
books have also contained an article specifically
aimed at blocking Ocalan's retrial.
Deniz Baykal, the nationalist leader of Turkey's
parliamentary opposition, told the centrist daily
Milliyet on Tuesday that surrendering to
Strasbourg's demands would mean "playing with
Turkey's honour, inciting the people on an issue
where Turkey is indisputably right. It is
unacceptable now for us to bend our necks merely
because of EU pressure."
www.guardian.co.uk
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