Turkey: No admission to EU for war-mongers! Instead of the PKK equal opportunity at last for 15 million Kurds!

"Turkey: No admission to EU for war-mongers! Instead of the PKK equal opportunity at last for 15 million Kurds! With these demands the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) called out to a vigil outside the Turkish Embassy in Berlin today, Thursday. The human rights organisation is protesting together with the Kurds living in Germany against the threatening invasion by Turkish troops of the peaceful Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan and is calling for a non-violent solution of the Kurd question in Turkey. "Treating the 15 million Kurds as citizens with equal rights would be a much more effective method of taking the wind out of the sails of the radical Kurdish Workers’ Party PKK than a war in the neighbouring country”, said the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch.

Zülch draws attention to the fact that the Turkish military have already undertaken with the consent of the deposed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, 24 large-scale operations against the PKK and achieved nothing other than the destruction of Iraqi-Kurdish villages. Instead of starting a war against the PKK with the ulterior motive of destroying the blossoming autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, Ankara could achieve a solution of the Turkish Kurd question much more quickly in a civilised way. This would mean a general amnesty at last for the 3835 Kurdish political prisoners. It would also mean making a start on the reconstruction of the 3876 Kurdish villages in southern Anatolia which were destroyed by the Turkish army and the development of a comprehensive programme for the return of the two million Kurds who have been displaced inside the country. The Kurdish language must also be given the status of an official language beside Turkish in government offices and in the school system in Southeast Anatolia. In this way the totalitarian PKK in Turkish Kurdistan would very quickly lose the support of the Kurdish people, who to this very moment are suffering oppression.

The GfbV condemns the totalitarian methods of the PKK in the Near East and their infiltration and threats to the Kurdish community in Germany just as much as the war crimes of the Turkish army.

"With an invasion of the autonomous north Iraqi Kurd region, which with its tolerance and equality of rights for the small nationalities and religious minorities has become a model for the Near East, the suspicion would become more concrete that the Turkish military and other nationalists are planning to seize the northern Iraqi regions which have large deposits of oil.”, warned Zülch.

The Turkish government and the Turkish generals have often emphasised their intention to invade north Iraq in order to forestall an annexation of the province of Kirkuk with Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan is the only place of refuge within Iraq for Kurdish, Turkmen, Arab-Sunni, Shiite, Assyro-Chaldaic and Mandaean refugees.