Turkey's Kurds still prepared to fight

Attacks by Kurdish separatists have surged this year after several years of calm.

from the July 9, 2007 edition

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DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY -

Sultan Koyun says she cries as much for fallen Turkish soldiers as for killed militants of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK). For the first half of this story, published June 6, click here.

But as a Kurdish member of the "Mothers for Peace" group in southeast Turkey, she holds the PKK and its three-decade separatist struggle in higher regard. She is proud to count her son as a guerrilla, fighting Turks "in the mountains" for minority Kurdish rights that until recent years have been all but denied by the Turkish state.

"The State says the PKK is a terrorist organization, but the PKK is founded by our sons and daughters," says the sturdy matron with wire-rimmed glasses and head scarf. "They are not terrorists. They are just Kurds, humans like others, created by God."

"There are 40 million Kurds," says Mrs. Koyun, overcounting regional numbers by 10 million or so. "My question is to the state: "Does this mean there are 40 million terrorists?"

Offering tea in the Spartan "Mothers offices," Koyun and another mother describe how lives for many ethnic Kurds are defined by harassment at the hands of Turkish authorities, which for decades referred to Kurds as "mountain Turks" and refused to permit a separate cultural identity, including banning the Kurdish language from government institutions.

There is no talk of the PKK's many civilian casualties, except denial that PKK has caused any. But they both say that government pressure caused their sons – like thousands of others – to join the fight with the PKK in a 15-year war that stopped in 1999 after an estimated 37,000 deaths, but has now begun to reignite.

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