Turkey promises to compensate Kurds
after years of terror
Human rights reforms driven by EU ambitions
Helena Smith in Athens
Turkey's Kurds could soon be compensated for the state terror they endured during 15 years of armed insurrection in the south-east under new legislation aimed at boosting the country's bid to join the EU.
Ankara's moderate Islamic government has proposed plans to compensate those who suffered at the hands of the security services during the campaign to defeat the separatist Kurdish Workers Party, PKK. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 1 million ethnic Kurds were victims of the 1984-99 conflict.
Presenting the draft bill, the justice ministry also promised to make amends to Kurds who had been subjected to violence by the outlawed PKK.
The law provides compensation for people who have suffered "both from acts of terrorist organisations and from measures taken by the state in the struggle against terror", it says.
Victims and their families could claim for damage ranging from injuries to death, as well as the destruction of property, livestock and crops. No figure has yet been given for a compensation deal.
The measure was announced days after Romano Prodi urged Turkey to forge ahead with reforms in the first visit by a European commission president to the Muslim-dominated country in four decades.
The legislation, the latest in a package of human rights reforms Ankara has pledged to enact, is expected to be presented to parliament in the coming months.
"This is yet another example of how the EU accession process is helping [the Turkish prime minister] Tayyip Erdogan's government move forward with a very bold reform agenda," said John Sitilides of the Western Policy Centre, a Washington-based thinktank.
The Turkish government's unexpected about-turn follows years of martial law in the Kurdish-populated south-east. A state of emergency, limiting freedom of expression and movement, was finally lifted under EU pressure last year.
Until the PKK abandoned its armed struggle after the arrest of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999, the Kurds had been subjected to a campaign of state-sanctioned terror.
Human rights groups say torture and death, in the form of "disappearances" and extrajudicial executions, were commonplace. Fearful that ethnic Kurds were providing logistical support to the rebels, the army burned, looted and destroyed villages, displacing hundreds of thousands.
Human Rights Watch claims that by 1994 "more than 3,000 villages had been virtually wiped from the map and more than a quarter of a million peasants made homeless".
Helicopters, armed vehicles, troops and "village guards" - Kurds drafted by the state - were all used in the campaign.
"When Turkish police, gendarmes, or soldiers had difficulty in distinguishing between rural civilian populations and armed insurgents, they drove the peasantry off their land and burned down thousands of settlements to create free-fire zones in the countryside," Human Rights Watch's UK branch wrote in a recent report.
"Soldiers torched villagers' homes, destroyed their crops and orchards and machine-gunned their livestock."
It said government return programmes were "a sham", devoid of sufficient funding or political will to regenerate the fragile peasant economy.
Human rights activists welcomed the legislation yesterday, but said they would reserve judgment on its effectiveness until it had been implemented.
Some suggested the move would serve the government by protecting it from compensation claims in the European court of human rights.
James Logan, a specialist on Turkey at the London branch of Amnesty International, said: "We obviously welcome any measure that brings some degree of justice to the victims of the widespread human rights violations that occurred in the south-east.
"However, such a bill would not bring to justice those who carried out and ordered extrajudicial executions, 'disappearances' and torture at the time. Such issues should not go unaddressed."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
