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Turkey's main Kurdish party to convene
congress
23.6.2006
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ANKARA, June 23,
2006 (AFP) , -- Turkey's main Kurdish political
group, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), will hold
its first congress Sunday, expected to result in a
decision to revise the party's leadership system.
A DTP spokesman said Friday that members of Sinn
Fein and Batasuna, the political wings of,
respectively, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and
the Basque separatist ETA, as well as members of the
European Parliament, would attend the congress to
show their solidarity with the Kurds.
The DTP was set up in November, pledging to work to
resolve the long-standing Kurdish conflict in Turkey
through peaceful means.
But the party has failed to achieve any
breakthrough, amid mounting violence in the
southeast by the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK).
The DTP has come under fire for sympathizing with
the PKK, blacklisted as a terror group by Turkey,
the European Union and the United States, and dozens
of party members face prosecution for supporting the
rebels.
The DTP advocates broader cultural and political
rights for Kurds and campaigns for the abolition of
a 10-percent electoral threshold required to enter
parliament.
At Sunday's congress, the party is expected to amend
its leadership system -- which currently has two
chairs, a man and a woman -- and bring it in line
with Turkish legislation which allows only one
person as party leader.
The change is expected to result in Aysel Tugluk,
the current chairwoman, withdrawing from the
leadership to leave her co-chairman Ahmet Turk, a
veteran Kurdish politician, at the helm.
Kurdish politicians in Turkey are routinely regarded
with suspicion and often seen as instruments of the
PKK.
Keen to boost its bid to join the European Union,
Ankara has granted the Kurds a measure of cultural
freedoms over the past several years.
The Kurdish conflict has claimed about 37,000 lives
since 1984 when the PKK took up arms for self-rule
in the mainly Kurdish southeast.
AFP
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey) wikipedia
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