The PKK Report of the International Crisis Group Introduced at TEPAV In a meeting held at TEPAV, the latest PKK report of the International Crisis Group was introduced by Huge Pope, Turkey/Cyprus Project Director.

ANKARA – The latest Turkey report of the International Crisis Group (ICG) was introduced with a meeting held at TEPAV on Tuesday, September 20, 2010. The findings and recommendations of the report titled “Turkey: Ending the PKK Insurgency” were presented by Huge Pope, Turkey/Cyprus Project Director, ICG, to a large group of participants.

The meeting started with an opening speech by TEPAV Director Güven Sak, who stated that Turkey was going through another transformation process and that it was important to continue to discuss and elaborate on the issue. He said, “We are not where we were two-three decades ago. This is a positive development. But we still have this nineteenth century problem to deal with in the twenty-first century. We have to find a way to manage this issue and to live together.”

Presenting the ICG report after Sak's speech, Hugh Pope stated that the PKK was making multiple attacks at the same time against explicitly civilian targets. He argued that their aim was to tempt the Turkish Armed Forces and the government to go back to the 1990s logic of violence and said, “The report we have tries to list all the reasons why the Justice and Development Party government and the Turkish authorities should not fall into this trap that has been laid for them by the PKK.” He said they had started writing the report in a very different atmosphere and in this respect highlighted how the government’s democratic approach had progressed. It could not be denied that things had been changing and that the process had been positive. He said, however, that the timing of these having taken place before the June 2011 elections, had been problematic.

He maintained that among the key findings of the report were necessity of the elimination of the hesitation about speaking Kurdish, employing Kurdish language teachers in schools that have such demand and the use of Kurdish in local administrative services. He recommended legislative amendments regarding demonstrations and prosecution methods. Turkey had to avoid targeting civilians in extraterritorial operations, election threshold had to be lowered and the media had to avoid racism in addressing the issue. He stressed that the Peace and Democracy Party had to end the political boycott and take part in the Parliament in the writing of the new constitution. Stating that the demands of the political Kurdish movement were unclear, Pope said, "They must be clear about what they want." Pope said that neither of the Kurdish people they interviewed during the writing of the report wanted a separate state and that they wanted to stay within Turkey.

The meeting continued with a question and answer session moderated by Nilgün Arısan Eralp, TEPAV European Union Institute Director. Eralp in this context expressed her grief about the bombing incident in Kızılay, Ankara, on the day of the meeting.