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Kurdish Party Threatens Turkey with Renewed Warfare
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, Aug 18 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) warned late Friday that its members would re-launch their armed campaign against Turkey if Ankara failed to address the grievances of its large Kurdish community, news agencies reported.
"We do not want war. [But] if the process [to resolve the dispute] runs into a bottleneck, we will try every means, including using arms," warned senior PKK commander Murat Karayilan.
He was speaking during a debate program broadcast live on the pro-Kurdish satellite television channel, Medya-TV, to mark the 17th anniversary of the launch of PKK's armed campaign for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.
Karayilan accused Turkey of ignoring Kurdish demands for greater cultural rights and continuing to pursue a campaign to annihilate the PKK, blocking any prospect of dialogue to resolve the dispute.
He warned that PKK fighters would retaliate in self-defense if Turkish security forces continued to hunt them down.
"If we take up our weapons and restart the war, it would not be like the previous one, but more intense and destructive," he said.
Karayilan urged Turkey's Kurdish community to demonstrate in protest at Ankara's rejection of dialogue to settle the long-running conflict.
The government has failed to introduce broadcasting and teaching in Kurdish, despite increasing European Union pressure on Turkey, which is seeking to join the 15-nation EU.
The PKK took up arms against Ankara in August 1984, starting 15 years of bloody confrontations which killed more than 36,000 people, most of them Kurdish fighters.
In September 1999, the group said it would stop fighting Ankara and withdraw from Turkish territory to seek a peaceful resolution to Kurdish grievances.
The statement followed a peace appeal from PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, currently on death row in a Turkish jail.
Since then, fighting has subsided and several thousand Kurds have moved to the north of neighboring Iraq.
But the powerful Turkish military has played down the peace bid as a ploy, calling on the Kurdish fighters to unconditionally surrender or face a military onslaught.
The Kurdish people are a large minority group, numbering about 61 million, with more than 99% of them Muslim.
More than two million people from southeast Turkey have been displaced by the conflict between the PKK, which is the largest armed opposition group, and Turkish government forces.
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