ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—Turkish President Receb Teyyib Erdogan has in the past strongly denounced Turkish army operations in Kurdish areas and described military actions as “state terror” against “Kurdish people,” according to a recently published report dating back to 1991.
The paper is said to have been prepared by Erdogan in 1991 when he was a party official in his hometown of Istanbul for his Rifah (Welfare) party at the time.
The report is released amid renewed violence in Turkey’s Kurdish regions between the army and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) where over 200 people have been killed since July.
With no sign of letup in the operations Erdogan lashed out on Kurdish leaders last week for their secessionist tendencies, a move in stark contrast to the position laid out in his 1991 report called “Kurdish issue and suggestions towards a solution.”
Erdogan’s recent comments came after the leader of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), Selahettin Demirtas, called for self-rule in Kurdish areas following months of intensified bombing campaigns by the army which has imposed on Kurdish towns and districts near Diyarbakir.
According to the report, Erdogan at the time denounced Turkish military incursions into the Kurdish east and called the Kurdish issue “a national question” that should be solved “by recognizing Kurdish language as an independent language and which has no relations to the Turkish language.”
“What is called the Southeastern issue is in essence the Kurdish question which is no doubt a national question. These areas, which are labeled as Southeast, have since the dawn of history been called Kurdistan,” Erdogan wrote in the report to the then leader of the Rifah party Necmettin Erbakan.
“This region (Turkey’s Kurdish areas) has suffered twice, from PKK assaults since 1985 and at the same time it has been subjected to state terror which has targeted the population for allegedly supporting the PKK,” Erdogan wrote in the report.
The current wave of violence in Kurdish region of Turkey began soon after the inconclusive June elections, which gave the HDP over 13 percent of the votes while Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) gained over 40 percent, but failing to form a coalition government.
Locked in a bloody standoff, both PKK and Ankara have refused to go back to the negotiating table which PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan called “a historic chance” in March 2015 after the Dolmabahce agreement was signed on February 28 between the HDP (representing the PKK) and the government in Ankara. Erdogan publically rejected the Dolmabahce later saying he had no knowledge of the exact terms of the agreement.
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