UN blasts campaign against the Kurds
Security forces carried out abuses, says latest report
GENEVA // Turkish security forces committed serious abuses during operations against Kurdish militants in south-east Turkey, the UN said yesterday.
A report from the United Nations’ rights office detailed evidence of “massive destruction, killings and numerous other serious human rights violations committed between July 2015 and December 2016 in south-east Turkey”. “Government security operations” have targeted more than 30 towns and displaced between 355,000 and 500,000 people, mostly Kurds, the report said. The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has waged an insurgency against Turkey since 1984. The violence was contained during a truce agreed in 2013, but fighting resumed when the ceasefire fell apart in the summer of 2015.
Satellite images of areas affected by the latest unrest “indicate an enormous scale of destruction of the housing stock by heavy weaponry”, the report said, with some neighbourhoods “razed to the ground”.
In Cizre, a mainly Kurdish town on the Syrian border, residents described the devastation of neighbourhoods as apocalyptic, the UN said.
Early last year nearly 200 of the town’s residents “were trapped for weeks in basements without water, food, medical attention and power before being killed by fire, induced by shelling”, it said.
The allegations come at a delicate time for Ankara, which is gearing up for an April referendum on whether to create an executive presidency that would expand president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s powers. UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein criticised Mr Erdogan’s government directly, saying he was “particularly concerned by reports that no credible investigation has been conducted into hundreds of alleged unlawful killings”.
“Not a single suspect was apprehended and not a single individual was prosecuted,” he said.
The UN rights office said it had been seeking access to areas affected by the anti-PKK operations for more than a year, but Mr Erdogan’s government had not approved a visit.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict between the military and the PKK, which seeks greater rights and autonomy for Turkey’s Kurdish minority.
The insurgent group is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
Repression by the Turkish authorities after a failed coup attempt last July has led to further abuses in the south-east, the UN report said.
Across Turkey after the attempted coup, more than 100,000 people have been dismissed or detained by police, accused of links to coup-plotters and also to the PKK. The UN human rights chief said he understood that Turkey faced difficult challenges but said that intensifying a crackdown on basic rights would only fuel further instability.