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Turkey's top military issues moderate
message to Kurds
10.4.2006
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DIYARBAKIR,
Kurdistan-Turkey, April 10, 2006 - Turkey's top
military official on Monday delivered a warmly
worded message for the people of Diyarbakir to
distance themselves from separatist Kurdish rebels
as he visited the southeastern Turkish
(Turkey-Kurdistan) city rocked by deadly riots two
weeks ago.
General Hilmi Ozkok, the chief of general staff,
blamed the riots that broke out in Diyarbakir on
March 28 on provocations by militants from the
separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has
been fighting the army since 1984.
"The incidents have saddened the entire Turkish
nation, but they can never be seen as representing
the general attitude of all the people of this
region," Ozkok, dressed in a camouflage uniform,
told reporters.
"What was done was wrong, but I hope the people will
wisely judge the right and wrong things they are
being told and act accordingly," he said.
"Despite everything, we love all the people of this
region... The armed forces are determined to conduct
all tasks they are given, but all of them love their
people," he said.
The riots erupted when vengeance-seeking Kurdish
youths attacked the police after the funerals of PKK
rebels killed in fighting with the army; they
quickly spread to other nearby towns.
The week-long unrest, the worst urban violence to
hit the region in years, saw hundreds of rioters
torch banks and public buildings, vandalize shops
and attack the police with firebombs.
Twelve people were killed as security forces opened
fire to disperse the mobs, while three women were
killed in Istanbul when rioters set a city bus on
fire with a Molotov cocktail.
Ozkok visited Diyarbakir as part of a tour to
inspect troops in the Kurdish-majority southeast,
where a period of relative calm was shattered in
June 2004, when the PKK called off a five-year
unilateral ceasefire.
The violence has raised fears of renewed ethnic
conflict at a time when stability is critical to
Turkey's bid to join the European Union.
The government has vowed to continue fighting the
PKK which -- along with the EU and the United States
-- it considers a terrorist group, but without
backtracking on EU-inspired reforms that expanded
the cultural freedoms of the Kurdish minority.
The Kurdish conflict has claimed more than 37,000
lives since 1984, when the PKK took up arms for
self-rule in the southeast.
Meanwhile today, Police defused a home-made bomb
found on a bus carrying judges and prosecutors to
work here on Monday and suspect Kurdish rebels to be
behind the failed attack, the Anatolia news agency
reported.
The driver found a suspicious package in the back of
the vehicle after he dropped his passengers off at
the Beyoglu courthouse -- the hub of the city's
central European quarter -- and returned to the car
park, the report said.
Bomb experts defused the device, made up of nearly a
kilo (about 2.2 pounds) of plastic explosives
attached to a mobile phone and primed to be set off
by remote control, the agency quoted anonymous
police officials as saying.
The bomb failed to explode because the phone's
battery was dead, it added.
Police were investigating whether the bomb was the
work of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),
which has waged a bloody separatist campaign in the
country's eastern and southeastern regions since
1984, Anatolia said.
The PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey,
the European Union and the United States, has in the
past conducted bomb attacks across the country,
including Istanbul, a city of more than 12 million.
The latest bomb attack in the city, which injured
three people last week, was claimed by a radical
Kurdish group - which police says is linked to the
PKK -- in reprisal for a recent wave of bloody
Kurdish riots that claimed 15 lives.
AFP
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