Turkish premier pledges rights, investment in Kurdish region

On visit to the southeast, PM Erdogan seeks the support of Kurds in upcoming local elections

Kurdish people stand in front of a closed shop on Saturday in Diyarbakir. Some shop owners shut their businesses to protest against Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rally for upcoming local elections in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir.

DIYARBAKIR (Reuters) – Turkey’s prime minister pledged on Saturday to complete a multibillion-dollar investment plan in the impoverished southeast, a move intended to help drain support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrilla group.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, campaigning ahead of the March 29 local elections, told thousands of supporters in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir that his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would bring jobs and development to a region scarred by unemployment and separatist violence. “Our country will wake up to a new ‘newroz,’” Erdogan told a cheering crowd in Diyarbakir, using the word for spring in the once-banned Kurdish language.

Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the Kurdish southeast, is a key election battleground where the AKP wants to gain fresh legitimacy after it narrowly escaped a legal attempt by its secularist opponents to ban it for Islamist activities in 2008.

A decisive win in the local polls would consolidate its grip on power and give it momentum to pursue its policies, including a plan to reform the military-inspired constitution, key for Ankara’s hopes to join the European Union.

Ahead of the vote, the AKP has boosted local spending and has given out white goods to the poor in the southeast, drawing the ire of opposition parties who say the government is using state money to win elections.

There are fears Turkey’s economy could slip into recession due to the global economic crisis, but Erdogan said the massive investment program will be completed by 2012. First announced in 2008 to the tune of 14.55 billion lira ($8.6 billion), it includes improving infrastructure and irrigation in the region.

Erdogan, whose AKP is locked in a fight for votes in Diyarbakir with the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), has been courting the support of Turkey’s 12 million Kurds who have long been discriminated against by the state. He was the first Turkish public figure to acknowledge in a landmark speech some years ago that Turkey had a “Kurdish problem.”

Erdogan’s speech, which was broadcast live on Kurdish state television, was well received by Kurds, weary of violence. “I felt like I was somewhere else because of what he said about Diyarbakir’s future,” said Huseyin Beden, 43, a shopkeeper. “We do not want violence anymore. We want stability, Diyarbakir deserves good things.”

ISTANBUL (AFP) – Armenian and other rights groups called for action Saturday over the screenings at Turkish schools of a controversial documentary on the Ottoman mass killings of Armenians, charging that the film incited racism and enmity.

The call follows an outcry in the small Armenian community following reports earlier this week that the Education Ministry had asked schoolteachers to show the documentary to students and file reports on the result of the screenings.

The documentary, called “Blonde Bride – The True Face of the Armenian Question,” has come under fire for taking Turkey’s official line that Armenians were not the victims of genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks in 1915-1917.

The film has also been criticized for violent images of Armenian gangs attacking Turks and piles of corpses it says were of Turks killed by Armenians.

“This documentary is a propaganda film... It is not only biased and hostile, but also provocative and openly racist,” said a declaration signed by seven rights organizations, among them Armenian foundations and the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly.

“This is not an objective production... It has been made to poison people’s souls and to turn Turks and Armenians into enemies,” it added. It called on the Education Ministry to launch an internal investigation and “expose and punish” those behind the order for screenings at schools.