Turkey's parliament met Tuesday to hear the government unveil a plan to end a deadly 25-year Kurdish insurgency, a project the opposition views as a threat to the country's unity. Opposition parties tried to delay the debate as soon as the session started, arguing that discussing the project on the anniversary of the death of Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, would be disrespectful to his legacy.
But the ruling Justice and Development Party, which has a comfortable parliamentary majority, easily rebuffed the moves. Interior Minister Besir Atalay was to make the government's case in Tuesday's initial debate while Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was expected to address lawmakers in a second-round discussion Thursday. Since August, the government has sought to build support for its initiative to give wider rights to the country's estimated 12-million-strong Kurds and thus get the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to lay down arms.
The project appeared headed for trouble last month when a group of PKK from the group's mountain stronghold in northern Iraq surrendered to Turkey in a gesture of support for the government plan. The group was detained and freed shortly afterwards. The subsequent hero's welcome organised for the rebels by thousands of Kurds chanting pro-PKK slogans unleashed anger across the country, prompting the government to halt the arrival of a second group. Opposition parties have accused the government of caving in to the PKK, which has been fighting for self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish south-east since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.
"They have carried the bloody murderers of the terrorist PKK on their shoulders... This process aims to pardon the PKK," Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party said at the weekend, charging that the plan would break up the country.
Deniz Baykal, the leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party, said the government's plan had hurt relatives of soldiers killed in the conflict. "Won't the mothers of our heroes, our martyrs now ask 'why did I send my son to die?'," he said last week.
Ankara has so far remained tight-lipped on its initiative. But media reports suggest measures may include lifting restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language, allowing the return of 12,000 Turkish Kurds currently in a camp in Iraq and investing several million dollars to tackle poverty and unemployment in the south-east. In a new move which could be part of its Kurdish peace plan, the government Tuesday submitted to parliament a bill envisaging lenient sentences against minors who are caught in pro-PKK demonstrations.
But critics say Erdogan could end up paying a dear political cost if the government moves to grant specific rights to Kurds. "The Kurdish opening could result in a net loss in popular support for the ruling party due to a nationalist backlash," Wolfango Piccoli from the Eurasia group, a London-based political risk consultancy firm, said in a note to investors.
Erdogan has said he will not back down from his plan, but also underlined that his government will never negotiate with the PKK and that military measures against the rebels will continue unabated. The PKK, however, says it will not abandon its armed struggle as long as Ankara keeps up military operations and fails to give official recognition to its Kurds in the constitution. "Discussing the Kurdish question in parliament is an opportunity to resolve the problem. But parliament should discuss ways to achieve lasting peace and not approach the issue through narrow political interests," the group said in a statement Monday.