Turkey's prime minister Wednesday pledged more investment for the country's restive Kurds but stopped short of any commitment sought by Kurdish leaders for a political solution to bloody conflict. Some 5,000 police, among them snipers positioned on rooftops, were on duty in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the Kurdish-majority south-east, as Recep Tayyip Erdogan held his main rally in the region ahead of general elections on June 12.
"The policies of rejection and assimilation are now over... We have largely resolved the (Kurdish) problem... We have prepared the ground for the settlement process," Erdogan told the cheering crowd.
Erdogan repeated pledges to rewrite Turkey's constitution, the legacy of a 1980 military coup, without saying what specific reforms his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), the election front-runner, would seek. Tensions have mounted ahead of the polls amid a renewed military onslaught on the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and deadly PKK attacks on police despite a truce the rebels declared last year.