Turkey tries to end bloodshed as Kurdish extremists step up attacks

With 40 dead in the past 10 days alone, Ankara considers options but chances of peace appear slim.

ISTANBUL // As Kurdish extremists step up their deadly attacks in Turkey, the government is desperately trying to find ways to stem the bloodshed, but chances for a comprehensive agreement to solve the Kurdish conflict seem slim. About 40 people have died in bomb attacks and clashes between the Turkish military and rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, in the past 10 days, according to official figures that included 17 PKK members in the toll.

On Monday, two farmers in the southern province of Hatay were killed by soldiers who mistook them for PKK rebels. The government in Ankara has started an investigation into the incident. Confronted with the rising death toll, the political and military leadership in Ankara has vowed to improve Turkey's intelligence co-operation with Iraq and the United States aimed at localising PKK groups that are trying to cross the border into Turkey from Iraq, where the rebels have their headquarters. The strengthening of that co-operation was one of the issues that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, raised during a meeting with Barack Obama, the US president, during the G-20 summit in Toronto last weekend.

The government has also vowed to continue its programme of political reforms, called "Democratic Opening", aimed at solving the Kurdish conflict politically. "If we abandon the 'Opening', the warlords, the vampires feeding on the blood of the young will win," Mr Erdogan said last week. Almost 200 non-governmental groups in the Kurdish south-east of Turkey, ranging from business organisations to ones representing pharmacists and butchers, called on the military to stop its operations in the region and on the PKK to end their attacks.

But in Ankara, obstacles that have prevented a political consensus on the Kurdish question from emerging show no sign of going away. One year before the next general elections are due, the search for a solution is hindered by party politics. Mr Erdogan has said he is ready to meet opposition leaders to find common ground in the fight against the PKK's terrorism, but Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, yesterday said he would sit down only with Abdullah Gul, the president, and not with Mr Erdogan.

There is also no agreement on which side should silence its guns first, the military or the PKK, regarded as a terrorist group by Turkey and the West. Mr Erdogan said that military operations in the Kurdish area could be lowered to a minimum if the PKK stopped its attacks. But Emine Ayna, a prominent Kurdish politician, called on the military to stop its operations first. Mr Erdogan's "Opening", while initially applauded as a wise step to deal with a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people since the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in 1984, has failed to calm the situation. Some observers say that the "Opening" was bound to fail because it raised different expectations for the Turkish majority and the estimated 12 million Kurds in the country.

"For Turks, the 'Opening' was about stopping the fighting," Cengiz Candar, a veteran political analyst and influential newspaper columnist, told a panel on the Kurdish question organised by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, or Tesev, a think tank, in Istanbul last week. "But for Kurds, the issues were identity and self-rule." In centrally governed Turkey, demands for regional or local autonomy are often seen as a threat to national unity.

Mrs Ayna of the BDP demanded a new constitution and the release of "all political prisoners". Many Kurds see Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader serving a life sentence for treason, as Turkey's most prominent political prisoner. For Ankara, Ocalan's release or involvement in the search for a solution is out of the question. But such long-held positions are coming under pressure from parts of the Turkish establishment. Several commentators of mainstream newspapers have called for talks between the state and the PKK or even Ocalan himself.

Last week, Sedat Aloglu, a businessman and former parliamentary deputy of a centre-right party, made headlines by saying Turkey should listen to three key demands coming from the Kurdish side: to insert an acknowledgement of the existence of the Kurdish people into the constitution, to give regional autonomy to the Kurds - and to free Ocalan. "If we do not have the right diagnosis, there can be no cure," Mr Aloglu told the Haberturk news channel after his remarks at a meeting of a business group became public. "I did not say that we should do all this. I said it does not help if we close our ears to it."

He said a round-table meeting attended by representatives of government, parliament, judiciary, media and non-governmental organisations under the chairmanship of Mr Gul, the president, should convene to find a "formula for a reasonable compromise". @Email:[e-mail]