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Turkish parliament sworn in, Kurds return to
Turkish parliament after 15 years
5.8.2007 |
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August
5, 2007
ANKARA,-- Turkey’s new parliament was sworn
in at a marathon session Saturday in a mood of
conciliation following last month’s landslide
victory of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
Islamist-rooted governing party.
But a parliamentary vote later this month to elect
the country’s next president may yet revive the row
that triggered a political crisis in April and
forced the early polls on July 22.
The spotlight Saturday was on 21 militant Kurdish
politicians who won seats for the first time since
the early 1990s when the first parliamentary stint
of Kurds campaigning for minority rights ended in
disaster.
But the deputies of the pro-Kurdish Democratic
Society Party (DTP) seemed determined not to repeat
the storm unleashed at the memorable swearing-in
ceremony of 1991 by Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish
woman to enter parliament.
The oldest member of the assembly, 83-year-old Sukru
Elekdag of the opposition People’s Republican Party,
presided over the session pending the election of a
new speaker.
Calling on the 550 lawmakers to “act with the good
sense and sagacity of statesmen, without yielding to
emotion, in a spirit of conciliation and dialogue,”
he invited them to swear, individually and in
alphabetical order, fidelity to “the secular and
democratic Turkish republic.”
The 10-hour oath-taking session continued until
after midnight (2200 GMT).
DTP leader Ahmet Turk and his colleagues shook the
hand of Devlet Bahceli, head of the Nationalist
Action Party, which backs a merciless war against
the armed Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK).
“Our ideas cannot be the same, but we are going to
work under the same roof,” Anatolia news agency
quoted Turk as saying. “We are civilised people, we
will have relations.”
He also told CNN-Turk television, “We want to help
in working out a peaceful and democratic process
.... in a spirit of conciliation and dialogue: it is
with these sentiments that we intend to accomplish
our mission in parliament.”
In 1991 Zana said she was taking the oath under
duress and added a message of peace in Kurdish,
breaking a taboo on speaking the language in public.
She also wore a headband in the colours of the PKK,
whose bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule has
claimed more than 37,000 lives since 1984.
In 1994, parliament lifted the immunity of Zana and
her Kurdish colleagues on charges of aiding the PKK,
which Ankara lists as a terrorist organisation.
Some of them, including Zana, were jailed for a
decade; others went into exile or joined the PKK.
Since then Turkey, under EU pressure, has lifted
emergency rule in the Kurdish-majority southeast and
legalised broadcasts and private language courses in
Kurdish.
Despite their peaceful rhetoric, the DTP members
remain under suspicion of being a PKK tool, fuelled
by their refusal to condemn the group as terrorist.
Army commanders, who traditionally make a short
appearance at the ceremony, were not expected to
attend Saturday, officially because of a high-level
military meeting.
Media reports, however, said the generals were
reluctant to witness the inauguration of
recalcitrant Kurdish members of parliament.
Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a fierce
proponent of secularism, would not attend either, as
he did after the 2002 elections.
Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)
won 341 seats in parliament in last month’s polls,
followed by the Republican People’s Party with 99
seats, the Nationalist Action Party with 70, the DTP
with 20 and the Democratic Left Party with 13.
The remaining MPs are independents, among them a
Kurdish activist who is likely to join the DTP
later.
Erdogan was forced to bring elections forward from
November after the AKP failed to install Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul as Sezer’s successor when an
opposition boycott blocked two parliamentary votes
in April and May.
The crisis worsened with a threatening statement
from the army and mass street protests against the
prospect of a president from the AKP, which
secularists accuse of seeking to erode the
separation of state and religion.
The party, which has disowned its Islamist roots,
denies the charges.
Gul has signalled he remains a candidate for
president, saying that the AKP’s election victory
reflects popular support for his bid.
A referendum on constitutional reforms initiated by
the AKP in the wake of the turmoil over Gul’s
candidacy, including electing the president by
universal suffrage instead of by parliament, will
take place on October 21.
AFP
** The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Kurds are not recognized as an official minority in
Turkey and are denied rights granted to other
minority groups. Under EU pressure, Turkey recently
granted Kurds limited rights for broadcasts and
education in the Kurdish language, but critics say
the measures do not go far enough.
Others estimate over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
Turkey is home to over 25 million ethnic Kurds, some
of whom openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK for a
Kurdish homeland in the country's mainly Kurdish
southeast of Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan ( Kurdistan-Turkey)
wikipedia
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