Turkey Vows No Tolerance of Kurd Militants

By SUZAN FRASER - The Associated Press - Friday, November 25, 2005

ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkey vowed Friday to offer no tolerance for Kurdish militants despite concern over actions of its own security forces after a convicted rebel was allegedly targeted in a grenade attack earlier this month.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presided at a security meeting of Cabinet ministers and military commanders to discuss the Nov. 9 attack on a book shop in the mainly Kurdish town of Semdinli, which killed one person but not its apparent target.

The attack raised fears that security forces had attempted the kind of summary execution that was common in the fight against Kurdish rebels in the early 1990s. It sparked days of rioting by Kurdish rebel sympathizers that left four people dead.

The government has promised a thorough investigation and no cover-up, and parliament this week voted to set up its own committee to look into the attack.

A brief statement issued after the security meeting said "all necessary measures" were being taken to solve people's problems, but stressed "no tolerance should be shown primarily toward separatism and every kind of illegal actions."

The Kurdistan Workers Party has been fighting the military for autonomy for Kurds in southeastern Turkey since 1984, and some 37,000 people have died. The group is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

The book store attacked Nov. 9 is owned by Seferi Yilmaz, a former guerrilla who served 14 years in prison for participating in the group's first armed attack in August 1984.

After the Nov. 9 attack, Yilmaz and bystanders chased the suspected attacker to a car and captured him and two paramilitary police officers standing nearby.

Inside the car, allegedly owned by the paramilitary police, there were reportedly hand grenades similar to the one used in the attack, guns, plans of the shop and a list indicating which Kurdish clans were pro-state and which were not.

In violence Friday, suspected Kurdish guerrillas fired two rockets at a police station and the house of a local police chief in the southeastern town of Idil in Sirnak province, bordering Iraq, causing damage to the building but no injuries, the Anatolia news agency reported.