Friday, August 19, 2005 [By Agence France Presse (AFP) - Compiled by Daily Star staff ]

Rebel group expected to declare truce in response to Erdogan's call for dialogue.
Turkey's leading Kurdish politicians urged the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to declare a cease-fire to help find a peaceful settlement to the Kurdish conflict.
The appeal of the Democratic Society Movement (DTH), a formation which groups Turkey's most prominent Kurdish political figures and is soon expected to formally become a party, came in the eve of a news conference by the rebels, scheduled today in Brussels.

"It is an urgent, vital and general expectation from the PKK ... to make as soon as possible a decision for a cease-fire, without conditions and time limits, in order to ensure a democratic ground for discussing the [Kurdish] problem, free from a climate of violence," the statement said.

In a landmark speech last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged the Kurdish conflict would be resolved with "more democracy" despite an increase of violence by the PKK, which Ankara considers a terrorist group.

Erdogan admitted Ankara mistreated its Kurds in the past and said the government was open to dialogue with the civic society to resolve the conflict.

"We see the remarks of the prime minister as a courageous, determined and consistent political opening that can be translated into action," the DTH said.

The PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group also by the United States and the European Union, has stepped up violence over the past few months after calling off a five-year unilateral truce in June 2004 that had brought relative peace to Turkey's turbulent mainly Kurdish southeast.

The PKK, which says Ankara's reforms to expand Kurdish freedoms are inadequate, has said it will consider a new cease-fire if the army also stops military operations against the rebels.

The Kurdish conflict has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984, when the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast.

The brutal state response to PKK violence also led to gross human rights breaches on both sides and opened a wide confidence gap between Ankara and the Kurds, who make up about a fifth of the country's 70-million population.

Keen to boost its bid to join the EU, 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 broadcasts over the past several years.

Today's news conference is scheduled to be held by Zubeyir Aydar, the head of KONGRA-GEL, PKK's political wing.

But a senior Turkish diplomat said Thursday that Turkey has asked Belgium to arrest Aydar.

Aydar "is an outlaw and is the head of a terrorist organization. We have asked them [Belgian authorities] to treat him accordingly," the diplomat, who requested anonymity, said.

Aydar became one of the first Kurdish lawmakers to be elected to the Turkish Parliament in 1991 as a member of the Democratic Party (DEP), which was banned by Turkish authorities three years later for links with the PKK.

He escaped abroad following the ban and has often surfaced in Europe as well as northern Iraq where thousands of PKK rebels have found refuge since 1999 when the group called a unilateral cease-fire and withdrew from Turkish soil.

Meanwhile, another man sought for belonging to the PKK was arrested on the Spanish island of Mallorca, the Spanish civil guard said. Fikret K., a Turkish citizen holding Belgian travel documents, was under an international arrest warrant for membership in the PKK. He was sentenced in absentia to 12 and a half years in prison. - AFP