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
Page 2 of 3
"The PKK is an organic part of society here, and largely through dead bodies," says a Western-educated Kurdish analyst in Diyarbakir who spoke on condition of anonymity.
TICKING OFF numbers, he says that 20,000 PKK militants have been killed, 10,000 more are in prison, and that there are 20,000 PKK activists in Europe, all with extended families. That means that hundreds of thousands of Kurds "are organically tied to the PKK," he says. This analyst himself lost three siblings who fought for the PKK.
"The naive strategy would be to claim they are only a terrorist organization, with no support," says the analyst. One hurdle is the "dehumanization" of Kurds by constant use in the media of the "terrorist" label.
Koyun's son was arrested in 1994 at the institute where he was a student, during the peak of a sweeping Turkish military state of emergency marred by mass clearances of Kurdish villages, disappearances, and torture. The son was "tortured badly," the mother says, so "had to run away to the mountains" – the euphemism here for joining the rebels.
Abuse continues in Turkey, though the state of emergency was lifted years ago. "Torture, ill-treatment, and killings continue to be met with persistent impunity for the security forces in Turkey," Amnesty International reported last week.
There were "widespread allegations of torture" after mass arrests during lethal demonstrations in Diyarbakir in March 2006, Amnesty said, in which 10 protestors were shot dead.
Koyun has been questioned many times by police, and once when her husband was arrested, he was told that 800 guerrillas had been killed.
RSS feed
