DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, 13 August 2005 — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged yesterday that the Kurdish conflict in Turkey would be resolved with “more democracy” despite a marked increase in violence by armed Kurdish rebels whom Ankara considers “terrorists.”

“I want you to know that there will be no going back from the point Turkey has come to... We will not allow any regression in the democracy process,” Erdogan said in an emotional speech in this key city of Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast. “We will resolve all problems with more democracy, more civil rights and more prosperity,” he said, frequently interrupted by applause from a crowd of some 1,000 people.

In Arbil, northern Iraq, a senior Turkish Kurd rebel leader welcomed Erdogan’s statement, but said he wanted to see how this translates into action. “We believe Erdogan’s statements are significant,” but what matters is what concrete actions will be taken on the ground, Zubeyir Aydar, head of KONGRA-GEL, a sub-group of the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said in a statement received by AFP.

Erdogan was seeking to allay concerns that a recent increase in attacks on military and civilian targets blamed on the PKK might prompt Ankara to introduce measures that would diminish the fragile freedoms the sizeable Kurdish minority has only recently gained. Keen to boost its bid to join the European Union, Ankara has ended 15 years of emergency rule in the southeast and allowed the Kurdish language to be taught at private courses and used in public television and radio broadcasts.

The Kurdish conflict has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984, when the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast, ravaging the meager infrastructure and the mainstays of farming in the region and forcing poor peasants to migrate en masse into urban slum areas.

Diyarbakir Mayor Osman Baydemir, a leading Kurdish politician, welcomed Erdogan’s promise for a democratic settlement of the Kurdish question. “I hope his pledges will lead to the opening of a new page” in Ankara’s ties with the Kurds, Baydemir told NTV television. “A new ground is required to ensure that the arms are silenced. My hopes in this direction were boosted today,” he said. In his statement, Aydar said, “we also believe that a new page should be opened,” but he noted that Erdogan failed to say whether the government was considering an end to military operations against the PKK.

Meanwhile, a senior PKK commander said in an interview with AFP the PKK is ready to lay down arms if the army ends a crackdown on its militants and Ankara guarantees the rights of the Kurds,. “For armed action to stop the (Turkish army) operations should end... If the operations stop, there will naturally be a cease-fire,” Murat Karayilan, a right-hand man of Ocalan, told AFP in a guerrilla camp in the Sinena mountains in northern Iraq late Thursday.

Karayilan said Ankara should also guarantee the rights of its Kurdish minority, which comprises about a fifth of the country’s 70 million population. “If the values of the Kurdish people are acknowledged and guaranteed by the constitution, there will be no need for arms. We will immediately give up,” he said.