Kurdish plan suffers delay

Tuesday 10 November

TURKEY'S parliament debates on the government’s plan to end a 25-year Kurdish insurgency delayed by opposition parties.

Last Tuesday, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was expected to present a general view of his plans about Kurdish political freedom, but opposition parties struggled to delay the government's announcement. A second-round discussion is scheduled to take place on Thursday to debate the details.

Twenty-five years ago, an illegal party, the PKK, Kurdistan Worker's Party, started an insurgency against the Turkish government in order to claim independence for the Kurdish people. The insurgency has claimed some 40,000 lives. PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan has been jailed since 1999.

Since August, the government has been trying to build support from the two main opposition parties for its initiative to give wider rights to the country’s Kurdish community. Prime Minister has yet to publicise the details. However, the plans are thought to include renaming towns and villages with Kurdish names, the use of the Kurdish language in the educational system, and more freedom to Kurds in electoral campaigns.

This issue is very sensitive in Turkey, a country with a very strong nationalist sentiment. Although Kurdish people account for 20% of the Turkish population, many of whom speak Kurdish as their first language, the Kurdish identity was not recognized until recently. The PKK is considered a terrorist movement in Turkey.

This nationalist sentiment has been strengthened since last October, when a group of PKK rebels from Iraq crossed the border to Turkey to lay down their arms. The group was not prosecuted as previous returnees. The subsequent hero’s welcome organized for the rebels by thousands of local Kurds unleashed anger across the country.

Ségolène

BBC NEWS