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ANKARA, Aug 2 (AFP) - 14h17 - The Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK), an armed Kurdish group
fighting the Turkish government, cannot follow IRA's
decision to disarm because Ankara is hostile to any
dialogue with the group, a PKK commander was quoted
as saying Tuesday.
"We are in favor of resolving the conflict not with
arms but through dialogue and politics, and this is
what we are struggling for," Murat Karayilan told
the Germany-based MHA news agency, which regularly
carries PKK statements.
"It is the Turkish state and not the PKK which is
seeking to obtain results with arms," he charged.
"It is you (Turkey) who say that our shift to
politics is more dangerious than the military
struggle."
The PKK, branded a terrorist group by Turkey as well
as the United States and the European Union, has
intensified attacks against the army in the mainly
Kurdish southeast over the past several months,
after calling off a five-year unilateral truce in
June 2004 on grounds that Ankara did not respond in
kind.
The group has also been blamed for attacks on
civilians, including the bombing of a bus in a
seaside resort last month, which killed five people,
including foreign tourists.
Karayilan argued that Ankara had offered the PKK
none of the gestures that he said London made to the
IRA, which last Thursday ordered its militants to
lay down their arms and pursue peaceful means to end
British rule in Northern Ireland.
He cited as an example the 1998 Good Friday peace
deal, negotiated with the participation of Sinn
Fein, IRA's political wing, and the release from
jail last month of a bomber who killed 10 people in
a 1993 attack in Belfast.
Ankara rejects dialogue with the PKK, and has banned
several pro-Kurdish political parties for links with
the rebels.
The Democratic People's Party, the main pro-Kurdish
party today, also risks such a ban in a case pending
at the constitutional court.
The PKK took up arms for Kurdish independence in
1984, but abandoned its claim for statehood in 1999.
It is now calling for Kurdish autonomy within a
federal system, an amnesty for PKK militants
guaranteeing their participation in politics, and
freedom for jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Such demands are all unwelcome in Ankara, which has
recently granted the Kurds a measure of cultural
rights as part of reforms to boost its bid for EU
membership.
The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed some
37,000 lives.
AFP
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