No sign of peace for Turkey Kurds after Erdogan victory

69 Kurdish militants killed in offensive

SILVAN, Turkey, Dec 19, (RTRS): The shepherd’s widow no longer asks God for peace.

Like many Kurds in Turkey’s southeast, Sevgi Gezici 22, believed President Tayyip Erdogan would relent in a violent clampdown against Kurdish militants after his party won back its majority in an election in November.

Three days after the vote, her husband, just back from seven months tending sheep, was shot dead in the street, caught in the crossfire as he ventured out of their house to find help for their children during a curfew, she said. His aunt was fatally shot minutes later after rushing to him.

“I used to pray for peace, for God to help Turks and Kurds,” said Gezici cradling their twoyear-old daughter beneath her husband’s portrait, which was covered in a thin scarf.

“After this, I have no hope. God can do what he wants. We are forsaken,” she said.

Before the Nov 1 vote, the view among Turkey’s Kurds was that Erdogan had engineered a new conflict with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to win over Turkish nationalist voters and help the AK Party he founded return to the single party rule it had lost in an earlier vote in June. Erdogan rejects such a plot.

But nearly two months after the second election achieved a stronger-than-expected single party majority for the AKP, swathes of Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast are still under curfew. Battles once fought in the countryside are now waged in densely populated urban areas.

Instead of relaxing the crackdown, Erdogan vowed this week security forces would “annihilate” militants in their “houses.”

Armoured police vehicles guard the entrance to Tekel, the Gezicis’ workingclass neighbourhood in the town of Silvan.

Facades of apartment blocks are riddled

Erdogan

with bullet holes, and interiors are charred black from fire.

Graffiti legible beneath whitewash reads: “The wolf’s teeth have tasted blood. Be afraid.”

Residents say the threat was written by the police.

More than 130 civilians have been killed in the southeast since the PKK abandoned a two-year ceasefire in July, according to the Human Rights Association (IHD). The government has not given a civilian death toll, but says 3,000 rebels have been “neutralised” in Turkey and rebel camps in northern Iraq.

Raci Bilici, head of the IHD in Diyarbakir, the southeast’s largest city, said that rather than use the power gained from its election victory to restart the peace process, the government took it as a mandate to crack down harder.

“Voters said: ‘Fight.’ The election showed the government has support for its crackdown, so why relent?” he said. “But with violence spreading to cities, the fear is we may cross the threshold of civil war.”

Meanwhile, Sixty-nine Kurdish militants and two Turkish soldiers have been killed in four days of fighting across southeast Turkey as security forces ramp up operations against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), security sources and the military said on Saturday.

The military said Turkish warplanes taking off from their southeastern base in Diyarbakir had also bombarded PKK camps in northern Iraq on Friday, destroying shelters and weapon posts.

A two-year ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK fell apart in July, shattering peace talks and reviving a conflict that has afflicted the mainly Kurdish southeast for three decades, killing more than 40,000 people.

One Turkish soldier was killed and another was lightly wounded on Saturday in clashes in Sur district, which has remained under a police curfew for the past two weeks, in the predominantly Kurdish Diyarbakir province.

One of two soldiers wounded in the border town of Cizre on Friday also succumbed to his injuries, the army said.