PKK is Turks’ bed of nails, overshadows their Iraq policy – MP

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) issue is a source of trouble for the Turks and overshadows their policy towards Iraq, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s security & defense committee said on Sunday. “However, thanks to understandings between Turkey on the one hand and the Iraq’s federal government and Iraq’s Kurds on the other, there were some positive developments in this respect during the past year,” Hussein al-Shaalan told IraqiNews.com news agency. “The (Iraqi) Kurds can play a helping key role in pacifying the conditions in the northern areas. We can’t give up on Turkey nor it can give up on Iraq,” he said. Shaalan hoped for “more cooperation between the Iraqi and Turkish governments to sustain stability in the northern areas of Iraq.” The PKK is considered a “terrorist” organization by both Ankara and the United States. Over 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish PKK guerrillas have been killed since 1984 when the Turkish Kurds of the PKK took up arms for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey (Turkey-Kurdistan). A large Turkish Kurdish community openly sympathize with the PKK rebels. The PKK, or Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan in Kurdish, demanded Turkey’s recognition of the Kurds’ identity in its constitution and of their language as a native language along with Turkish in the country’s Kurdish areas. The party also demanded an end to ethnic discrimination in Turkish laws and constitution against Kurds, granting them full political freedoms. Turkey refuses to recognize its Kurdish population as a distinct minority. It has allowed some cultural rights such as limited broadcasts in the Kurdish language and private Kurdish language courses with the prodding of the European Union, but Kurdish politicians say the measures fall short of their expectations. AmR (S)/SR 2