Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Kurdish leader says Turkey now accepts autonomy

18/06/2004 AFP
CAIRO, June 18 (AFP) - 19h11 - Former Kurdish rebel leader Massud Barzani said Friday that Turkey now accepted Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq, abandoning decades of opposition to any special status for the minority community.

"A Turkish delegation visited us on June 9 and told us of an extremely positive policy under which Turkey will not oppose an autonomous status for Kurdistan within a federal Iraq," Barzani told the Arabic satellite television channel Al-Jazeera.

Turkey "wants to have the best relations with the Kurdistan region alongside its relations with the Iraqi government," said Barzani, who heads the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of two former rebel groups that run rival administrations in northern Iraq.

Barzani said the Turkish delegation had also delivered an invitation to visit Ankara, which he had accepted.

Turkey has its own much larger Kurdish minority and has long expressed fears that any move by Iraq or other neighbouring countries to grant the community autonomy would fan similar demands at home.

Southeastern Turkey remains devastated by the 1984 to 1999 rebellion fought by guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which cost an estimated 37,000 lives and saw hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their homes in army reprisals.

Ankara charges that remnants of the PKK still lurk in the mountains on the Iraqi border and has accused the US-led occupation of not doing enough to rein them in.

During a visit to the Turkish capital earlier this month, a senior official of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) vowed that a future Kurdish regional government would not tolerate Kurdish rebels from any neighbouring country operating from its territory.


http://www.kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=5122