ISTANBUL // Turkey's prime minister vowed yesterday that Kurdish rebels will "drown in their own blood" as he and the country's top military officials mourned over the flag-draped coffins of Turkish soldiers killed in cross-border raids by militants over the weekend. "Our pain is great, but we will not give in," Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in the eastern city of Van, not far from the country's frontier with Iraq, where he attended the funerals of 11 of the 12 troops slain Saturday.
"They will not win," he said of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. In a show of unity between the government and the military not seen in years, the president attended the burials alongside Ilker Basug, the chief of general staff. Earlier in the day, with the country reeling in shock over the killings and major cities in Anatolia and elsewhere threatened by further PKK violence, Mr Erdogan said his government's fight against what he called the "terrorist organization" would continue until it has been "annihilated".
Nine soldiers died in an attack by fighters of the PKK, early on Saturday south of the city of Semdinli, close to Turkey's border with Iran and Iraq. PKK fighters, crossing the border from the rebel headquarters in the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq, have struck in the region before, but the scale of the death toll stunned the military and politicians alike and set back hopes of solving the nearly three-decades-old conflict by peaceful means.
Two more soldiers died in the explosion of a road side bomb after the initial attack, and another soldier was killed by the PKK near Elazig in north-eastern Anatolia yesterday. Yesterday, Turkish ground forces pushed into the Kandil Mountains to attack PKK bases, killing four people, including a 15-year-old girl. In statements released before the funeral, Mr Erdogan said the attacks were directed against what has become known as the "Democratic Opening", a programme of political and legal reforms planned by the government as a means to peacefully end the Kurdish conflict, which started when the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in 1984 and which has cost tens of thousands of lives.
The fresh violence followed a threat by the PKK to intensify attacks after Ankara refused to accept Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed PKK leader, as an interlocutor. Ocalan told his lawyers he was halting what he called his efforts to reach a peaceful solution as of June 1. The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, or TAK, a shadowy Kurdish militant group that Turkey says was set up by the PKK to stage attacks against civilian targets, also said it would go on the offensive. The group, which killed eight people in bomb attacks in the west and south of Turkey in 2005 and 2006, warned tourists this month that the country's holiday regions had become "attack and revengeful areas".
Ahmed Denis, a PKK spokesman in the Iraqi Kurdistan regional capital of Arbil, told the AFP news agency the rebels were ready to escalate the fighting further. "We will take our operations to all Turkish cities if the government continues its attacks against us," he said. Turkey was bent on war and "not sincere in dealing with the Kurdish issue". Since mid-April, 38 soldiers and policeman have been killed in attacks blamed on the PKK. The TAK said it wounded 15 policemen in a bomb attack on a bus on the outskirts of Istanbul on June 8.
Turkey has been unable to stop the violence despite a massive military presence in eastern Anatolia. In 2007, Ankara won US approval for limited raids into northern Iraq to hunt down PKK rebels. But dozens of attacks on rebel positions from the air and a large-scale intervention of ground forces into the neighbouring country in 2008 have failed to destroy the rebel group. Improved cooperation between Turkey, the US and Iraq, including the sharing of intelligence data, have also been ineffective.
The government's "Democratic Opening" began with high hopes last year but has been rejected by both Turkish nationalists, who regard it as treason, and Kurdish politicians, who think it does not go far enough. Mr Erdogan pledged to continue his efforts, but observers say the latest attacks have sealed the Opening's fate. "The prime minister started out by saying 'the mothers should not cry anymore'" for their sons killed in fighting between the military and the PKK, Cuneyt Ulsever, a columnist for the Hurriyet newspaper, wrote yesterday. "The result is that mothers cry even more than before."
Mr Erdogan suggested that a third force was using the PKK against Turkey. "The terror attacks of recent days are an effort to show that the terrorist organisation [PKK] is still a useful tool for circles that have an account to settle with Turkey," he said in a statement. He did not give details. Some Turkish newspapers have suggested there may be links between the PKK and Israel, whose relations with Turkey have been going through a rough patch recently. But some say it is futile to look for international conspiracies. "The PKK is not fed by Israel, but by domestic politics," wrote Mehmet Barlas, a columnist for the Sabah newspaper.
Nihat Ali Ozcan, an expert on the PKK at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, or TEPAV, a think tank in Ankara, predicted that the violence will go on for some time. Pointing to parliamentary elections due next year, Mr Ozcan said in a telephone interview the PKK was trying to raise ethnic tensions in the country. "Violence brings questions of identity and ethnicity to the forefront, and that is beneficial for Kurdish nationalists," he said. In the Kurdish region, Mr Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP, competes with the pro-Kurdish Party for Peace and Democracy, or BDP. "It is a kind of bloody election campaign," he said.
* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse tseibert@thenational.ae