ANKARA, 3 October 2003 — Turkey and the United States have agreed an action plan to banish the threat of Turkish Kurdish rebels based in camps in northern Iraq, a Turkish official said yesterday after talks with US officials.
Turkey has called on Washington to take concrete action to deal with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, also known as KADEK, as it considers asking parliament to send troops to Iraq to help keep the peace there.
“We have agreed on an action plan with the United States to eradicate PKK/KADEK from northern Iraq,” Turkish Foreign Ministry official Nabi Sensoy told an Ankara news conference after the talks. Turkey stations thousands of troops just inside northern Iraq in a controversial deployment designed to stop hundreds of PKK militants from launching attacks on Turkish soil.
The presence of the Turkish troops has been a source of friction with Washington. US troops briefly detained 11 Turkish commandos in northern Iraq in July on suspicion they were involved in a plot to kill a senior Iraqi Kurdish official.
The United States has made it clear to Turkey that it is committed to dealing with the PKK, US state department official Cofer Black told the same news conference.
“We are very clear about this: PKK/KADEK is designated by the United States as a terrorist organization. There is no place in Iraq for PKK/KADEK,” he said. A US official said earlier yesterday that Ankara had pledged to refrain from unilateral military action in northern Iraq in return for $8.5 billion in loans for its frail economy.
Asked whether the “action plan” included military options, Sensoy said: “No option is ruled out for PKK’s eradication from northern Iraq. Everything is in.” He said Turkey was ready to “make any contribution” to help the United States cleanse northern Iraq of the rebels. “The related ministries and agencies will carry out the necessary work from now on the action plan,” Sensoy said, declining to give further details. Black, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, headed the US team at the talks, the second round of meetings the two sides have held since last month on the issue.
The chief of the powerful Turkish Army, Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, said Wednesday that there was no link between sending Turkish troops to Iraq, a plan that Ankara is currently considering, and fighting the PKK. But US action against the rebels could help the government here convince MPs to vote for the sending of troops to help the Americans in Iraq, according to observers.
Meanwhile, an alliance of pro-Kurdish parties charged yesterday that the conviction of former members for fraud in last year’s general elections was unjustified and amounted to intimidation ahead of local polls in 2004. “Ahead of every election, dissident parties are either banned or their legitimacy is called into question,” Akin Birdal, head of the small Socialist Democracy Party and a leading rights activist, told a press conference.
He was referring to an appeals court ruling Monday which upheld 23-month jail sentences on four former leaders of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, the Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP), on charges of falsifying documents in order to stand in the general elections on Nov. 3.
DEHAP has denied the charges, saying that while some of its local officials overlooked bureaucratic requirements, this did not constitute fraud. Members of SDP, EMEP — another tiny leftist party — and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HADEP), which has since been banned, ran on DEHAP’s ticket in the polls. DEHAP failed to win any parliamentary seats, but its participation affected the standing of other parties and the distribution of parliamentary seats.
Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Massoud Barzani, a prominent Kurdish member of Iraq’s Governing Council, called for a return to stability in Iraq at talks in Damascus yesterday, SANA news agency reported. The two men said that it was “necessary for security and stability to be returned to Iraq,” said the official news agency, and expressed their support for “the consolidation of Iraq’s national unity.”
Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), arrived in Syria on Wednesday for talks about the situation in Iraq and bilateral relations. After talks with Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam, Barzani accused “foreigners infiltrating into Iraq of creating problems for the Iraqi people.”
