Pkk - terrorist organization or freedom fighters?

[haikyan]

do not try to use our issue for your dirty stuff!

killing innocent people is the most dishonourable thing in the world. we sacrified 1.5 million innocent people to a sick mentality like you have.

i don't believe that kurds are generally suffering in turkey, it cannot be even compared the misery we lived.

PKK is just another vulgar terrorist organization like Al-queda, taliban, or the ones who has killed 1.5 million armenians.

PKK is just a irrational organization, which damages its own people at most.

never, never compare your problems to ours!

[haikyan]

they are diffrent version of you

6 vilages is promised to armenians by england

and 6 or more to kurds

thats all

in istanbul in my frien grpup there are armeenians kurds türk çerkhes etc and theyer all people first they are all human

i'm not interested in politics or what was promised. i just say, although if they would have a little right on those 6 cities, it's not an excuse for killing innocent people. they can set up an army and go into a war, it's ok but pkk kills babies, women and children.

they are doing, what has been done to us. i can't understand how they can be supported in here.

regardless of its nationality, or religion, killing innocent people is a cowardly murder. and pkk is a cowardly murdrer. they are not killing soldiers, they are killing people.

[Aytug]

Illegal electricity use in Hakkari=%98

" " " in Trabzon=%2

That is why government think twice when give service to East. We have tried to wake up the Kurds to be against the PKK. These people living in East does not interested in politics, one day they walk with PKK because of the guns towards them, another the walk with Turkish flags. They are with the authority. May the peace come over this terrorism..

[Joseph]

Inside PKK’s camp: This girl is only 15, and she wants to start another war

Friday, May 26, 2006
The Times
Zilan, 15, may not be big enough for her uniform but she is ready to use her Kalashnikov against Turkey. Her parents, she says, are proud of herBy Matthew McAllester, Times correspondent reports from the PKK's Sinini Camp in Iraq

The platoon of Kurdish fighters stood to attention in three lines, staring straight ahead in the direction of their homeland and their target - Turkey.

The country that hopes to get into the European Union was only a few miles away from this rebel training camp, across snowy peaks melting with the arrival of spring.

At the end of the first line was a girl, a recent recruit like many in the platoon. She blushed and giggled when asked how old she was.

“Fifteen,” she said, giving her name as Zilan. A grenade hung from her belt, a Kalashnikov rifle at her side.

Weren’t her parents worried about her? “They’re glad I am here,” she replied, a little irritated at not being treated like an adult. “They are proud.”

This is the newly invigorated, growing PKK, the Turkish Government’s worst nightmare as it tries to persuade the EU that Turkey is a peaceful, increasingly democratic country worthy of becoming the first Muslim nation in the EU.

The Kurdish guerrilla group, listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU and United States, has in recent months been waging an increasingly brutal war with the Turkish military, reigniting an ethnic conflict at Europe’s gateway to Iran and Iraq. With a nuclear crisis developing in Iran, and a costly three-year war showing no signs of abatement in Iraq, the PKK’s renewed conflict could further destabilise the region.

“This is one of our top priorities,” James Jeffrey, the US State Department’s Iraq co-ordinator, said in Washington this week.

Earlier this month the conflict drew in Iran, which the PKK claims has been shelling and attacking its bases in northern Iraq, perhaps on behalf of Turkey. It has threatened to retaliate inside Iran.

In Turkey, with the shoot-outs in the Kurdish southeast have come bombings in Istanbul, a suicide attack in the east, riots and echoes of the “dirty war” that the state waged in the 1990s against Kurds. A PKK splinter group claimed responsibility for the huge fire that engulfed the cargo section of Istanbul’s airport on Wednesday.

Just when Turkish ministers want to talk up their country’s improved human rights record, strong economy and bright future, Turkey’s news channels and its people are obsessed with a war everyone thought was over.

In the 1980s and 1990s that war cost 35,000 lives. In its new incarnation, people on both sides die or are injured every week. On May 4 a bomb exploded in the mostly Kurdish city of Hakkari as a military vehicle protecting a school bus went past: 21 people, including 11 children, were injured.

“Yes, it will go worse — for the terrorists,” said Yasar Yakis, a former Foreign Minister who heads the Turkish parliament’s EU harmonisation committee. “I don’t see that a country of 73 million inhabitants and an Army of 800,000 will surrender to a handful of terrorists.”

Murad Karialan, co-president of the PKK, insisted that it was merely defending itself against attacks from the Turkish Army. “It’s not part of the PKK’s strategy to continue armed struggle,” he said, speaking from a base in northern Iraq where the US Army, consumed with fighting insurgents, has so far left them alone. “The Kurdish people have the right to defend themselves against Turkish army attacks.”

The PKK called off its four-year unilateral ceasefire in June 2004 but it was only six months ago that the conflict began to escalate.

On November 9 a man came to the door of a small bookstore in Semdinli, which sits in a steep valley close to where Turkey meets Iran and Iraq. He threw two grenades into the store, which was owned by a man who had spent 15 years in Turkish prisons for his pro-Kurdish activities, and ran.

The grenades killed one man. But the owner, Seferi Yilmaz, 44, was uninjured and rushed out in pursuit. Local Kurds captured the attacker and two other men waiting for him in a car near by.

Two turned out to be Turkish paramilitary intelligence officers. The third was a former PKK member turned informer. In the car boot the crowd found more weapons, maps and lists of possible targets.

Soon after, Turkey’s General Yasar Buyukanit, tipped to become chief of staff this year, said that he knew the attacker and that he was “a good guy”.

The officers’ trial started this month with the prosecution claiming that the men formed a covert, illegal hit squad targeting suspected PKK members.

The attack and General Buyukanit’s remarks caused a huge scandal, exposing a fundamental fault line in Turkish society.

The Turkish Government and the EU are trying to wrest away some of the military’s huge power. Many suspect that the military wants to stoke the conflict with the PKK to make itself seem indispensable.

The Semdinli incident seemed to suggest that this was more than a conspiracy theory.

Then on March 3, the elderly parents of prominent Kurdish exiles were found garrotted in their home in Dogancay.

Medeni Ferho, one son, would be arrested if he came back to Turkey. So during his parents’ funeral he spoke to a fellow mourner via mobile phone from Belgium.

“They can’t frighten us with this kind of thing,” shouted out the mourner to the sombre crowd, repeating Ferho’s words. There was no doubt who Ferho meant by “they”.

Whether the murder was carried out by the security forces or not did not matter much politically. The hundreds of mourners — and thousands of other Kurds — were convinced that this was another brutal escalation by the Turkish “deep State”, as the military and other non-elected parts of the Turkish state are known. Perhaps most troubling for those who see Turkey as a country to be welcomed into the EU is that even in the tourist magnet of Istanbul, Kurdish terrorist bombings are on the rise. Late last year a supermarket and an internet café were bombed by a splinter group of the PKK, and the PKK is recruiting in the city.

In an apartment building in a slum 30 minutes’ drive from the centre of Istanbul, the parents of one recent recruit spoke for the first time about the decision that their 23-year-old daughter Aisha made a year ago. Zemzeme Arvas sat nervously on her couch next to her husband, Hamza, a construction worker. Like their daughter, they nurse a burning resentment against Turkey. In 1994, at the peak of the war between the PKK and the Army, the military burned down their village of Peyndas, the family said.

Aisha never forgot — or was never allowed to forget — about the home that her family, like thousands of displaced Kurds, had to leave behind in flames, her parents said.

She was politically active as a teenager and after one demonstration she and her cousin, Silan Arvas, 20, were imprisoned. After they were released, her parents said, they began talking to a PKK recruiter in Istanbul.

Just over a year ago they went southeast and from there they crossed into northern Iraq. Zemzeme never expects to see her daughter again. “If they want to join (the PKK), I am proud,” she said of her seven children. Such statements are enough to get people arrested in Turkey.

“No parents would like their children to go and get involved in clashes,” she said. “But my head is upwards, as we say here. As soon as she went there was a risk she would die. But we lose martyrs every day.”