By REUTERS
Published: Mar 6, 2012 00:04 Updated: Mar 6, 2012 00:04
ANKARA: Turkish Gendarmerie Colonel Ridvan Ozden was killed in 1995, his wife says, not by Kurdish militants, but by his own colleagues for opposing their “dirty war” and saying the solution to the Kurdish problem was not through “killing and being killed”.
Times have changed however. Turkey now acknowledges that alongside military offensives to crush the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), there can be a place for talks with related groups to find a peaceful way to end the 27-year conflict.
Secret talks between the Turkish intelligence service MIT and the PKK had already broken down by the time tapes of the meetings in Oslo were leaked last year; but while there is a chasm of mistrust, both sides appear willing to try again.
Asked by Reuters last week if talks with the PKK had been resumed, President Abdullah Gul stopped short of any confirmation, but commented:
“You see, if there are important problems in a country, to try to solve those problems either openly or in a closed environment, that is the duty of every state. And it is only natural that within this framework, initiatives have been realized and they are still being realized.”
Turkey has always viewed the PKK as a terrorism problem, but under Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party government there is now a recognition, hardly there in the 1990s, that there are other dimensions to the Kurdish issue, and other ways besides the military option of trying to solve it.
“Obviously I don’t know who the PKK is,” Gul said in an interview. “Of course they might have civilian extensions. There might be those who are on the same line in political life. There are those who are legitimate, and there are those who fight against us in the mountains.”
read more here:
http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article583677.ece
Note by the editor: This is very welcome News! Of course it is better to use the funds needed ‘to contain the PKK’ instead of in the Defence Budget for instance in the Education Budget or the Development Budget for the under-privileged Kurdish parts of the country. (Turkey has already increased its spending on those regions and it is hoped that it will bear fruit).