ISTANBUL, June 22 (AFP) - 17h05 - A group of 300 Kurdish intellectuals urged Ankara Wednesday to grant amnesty to Kurdish rebels fighting the army in Turkey's southeast region in a bid to stop increasing bloodshed in the region.A general amnesty should be declared as part of a solution to the conflict, former Kurdish parliamentarian Ziya Yusuf Ekinci told reporters, the Anatolia news agency reported.

The amnesty, he said, should include Abdullah Ocalan, jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has stepped up violence in the mainly Kurdish southeast since calling off a five-year unilateral ceasefire on June 1 2004.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed about 37,000 lives, most of them between 1984 and 1999, when the PKK waged a bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule in the region.

Ekinci's group also backed appeals issued last week by leading Turkish and Kurdish politicians and intellectuals to the PKK unconditionally to lay down arms.

Ankara has in the past amnestied rebels, but the measures produced disappointing results, mainly because they contained conditions calling on the militants to express repentance and provide information about underground PKK activities.

Only about 250 rebels turned themselves in under the latest amnesty in 2003.

The PKK is estimated to have about 5,000 militants in Turkey and in the mountains of neighbouring northern Iraq.

Under pressure to come into line with the democratic norms of the European Union it is seeking to join, Turkey has granted its Kurdish minority a measure of cultural freedom, but the rebels say the reforms are insufficient.