KURDISH ACTIVISTS ASSASSINATED IN PARIS
Deaths ‘a bid to sabotage’ tenuous start to talks in Turkey
PARIS/ISTANBUL: Three woman Kurdish activists, including a founding member of the PKK rebel group, were shot dead in Paris overnight in killings condemned by Turkish politicians trying to broker a peace deal.
Dozens of riot police formed a cordon around the Information Centre of Kurdistan, an institute in central Paris with close links to the PKK where the bodies were found soon after midnight yesterday.
Sakine Cansiz, PKK co-founder, and two other women appeared to have been shot in the head, a French police source said.
It was not immediately clear who had carried out the killings, but the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been hit by internal feuding while waging an armed campaign in the Turkish south-east.
The killings came shortly after Turkey announced it had opened talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader jailed on the prison island of Imrali, near Istanbul. The talk would almost certainly raise tensions in the PKK over demands and ceasefire terms.
“This is a political crime, there is no doubt about it,” said Remzi Kartal, a leader of the Kurdistan National Congress, an umbrella group of Kurdish organisations in Europe.
“Ocalan and the Turkish government have started a peace process, they want to engage in dialogue, but there are parties that are against resolving the Kurdish question and want to sabotage the peace process.”
The Kurdish question has taken on a particular urgency with the rise of Kurdish groups in neighbouring northern Iraq, where they control an autonomous zone, and in Syria. Turkey fears that Syrian President Bashar alAssad could encourage Kurds to feed militancy in Turkey.
A senior member of Turkey’s ruling AK Party said internal feuds had occurred in the past whenever there were signs of progress towards peace.
“Whenever we reach the stage of saying ‘Friend… let the weapons be silent’, whenever a determination emerges on this, such incidents happen,” the AK Party’s deputy chairman, Huseyin Celik, said. – Reuters