Turkey exploring paths to end Kurd conflict

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."   

Some 40,000 have been killed since the PKK began its armed campaign for a Kurdish state in 1984 under Abdullah Ocalan, now held on a prison island in the Sea of Marmara, near Istanbul.   

The conflict, besides its human cost, has put a brake on economic development and added to tensions and instability in the southeast, which borders Iraq, Iran and Syria.  

Erdogan says he is sticking by his "democratic opening" to grant greater cultural and linguistic rights to the nation's Kurds, some 20 percent of the population, but there has been little let-up in military operations even during the winter.   

Reuters