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Turkish investigators find suspected mass
grave of Kurds
5.1.2011 |
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January 5, 2011
ANKARA, — Authorities searching for mass
graves of Kurds who disappeared in the 1990s
unearthed the bones of eight people in a field in
the Kurdish region in southeast Turkey on Wednesday,
a lawyer and reports said.
Kurdish activists claim a number of Kurds who went
missing during the height of a conflict between
Kurdish militants and Turkish security forces may
have been killed and buried in mass graves.
Prosecutors ordered Wednesday's excavations in the
mainly Kurdish Bitlis province after a tip from the
families of nine Kurds who disappeared shortly after
leaving their villages to join Kurdish insurgents,
Dogan news agency reported. |
File photo |
Enis Gul, who heads the
bar association in Bitlis, told NTV television that
DNA tests would be conducted to try to identify the
dead and determine whether the remains belong to the
missing Kurds.
Gul said excavations at the site near a highway
close to Mutki town could unearth more human
remains.
Authorities sealed off the site and journalists were
being kept away, Anatolia news agency said.
Turkey has fought Kurdish rebels who seek autonomy
in southeast Turkey since 1984. The fighting
subsided after Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the
rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, was captured
in 1999,www.ekurd.netbut
has flared up sporadically since then.
The PKK has been
fighting the Turkish state, which still denies the
constitutional existence of Kurds, to establish a
Kurdish state in the south east of the country.
But now its aim is the creation an autonomous region
and more cultural rights for ethnic Kurds who
constitute the greatest minority in Turkey,
numbering more than 20 million.
PKK's demands included releasing PKK detainees,
lifting the ban on education in Kurdish, paving the
way for an autonomous democrat Kurdish system within
Turkey, reducing pressure on the detained PKK
president, stopping military action against the
Kurdish party and recomposing the Turkish
constitution.
PKK demanded to stop military and political
operations and to release Kurdish politicians who
are unjustly detained. The organization also
requested to enable imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah
Öcalan's active participation in the process. The
group is considered a terrorist organization by the
European Union and the United States.
Human right groups believe many of the hundreds of
Kurds and leftists who disappeared in the 1990s were
victims of summary executions by government forces,
though there have been few prosecutions.
In 1999 nine Kurdish youths left their home to join
the Kurdish guerillas. Their relatives heard no news
from them since then. Locals believed that the
youths were killed by Turkish army along with 3
Kurdish guerillas and were buried in dumping ground
of Mutki Gendarme outpost, ANF reported.
Turkish army is accused of burying killed Kurdish
guerillas in mass graves between 1984-99, usually
using dumping grounds as mass grave areas.
In 1988 the Turkish government accepted that Turkish
military used a dumping zone in Kasaplar Deresi in
Siirt to bury Kurdish guerillas who were killed in
clashes.
The country has conducted reforms as part of its
European Union membership bid, clearing the way for
families of the disappeared to pursue the cases. The
government has also launched a campaign to reconcile
with the ethnic Kurdish minority.
Copyright, respective
author or news agency, AP | firatnews.com |
ekurd.net | Agencies
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