ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— “Nobody should worry. No matter where it is – whether it is the Diyarbakir Bazaar, Mardin or Silopi - we will compensate the losses of all of our citizens due to terror,” said Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, last Friday as he tried to charm his mostly Kurdish audience in Mardin.
“They started a fire, but God willing we will grow a rose garden at the site of the fire,” Davutoglu said in an apparent reference to the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who have been clashing with security forces since July last year.
The prime minister was speaking at the state university in Mardin, one of several Kurdish cities that have been mired in a bloody conflict with over 300 casualties and hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
Turkey has been widely criticized by rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for its “indiscriminate” warfare in urban areas.
The country’s own rights groups say the army uses schools to launch attacks on guerrilla positions in some districts of the cities and leveling entire buildings. Unofficial estimates suggest that the war-scared Kurdish districts could need nearly $10 billion to rebuild, something the prime minister was swift to address.
“We are going to treat all the wounds. We who have welcomed two and a half million Syrians are perfectly capable of offering all our help to our fellow citizens,” Davutoglu tried to reassure a local audience that has widely supported the PKK and its political offshoot in the parliament, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
“The AKP has intentionally created this problem and now it intentionally tries to offer a solution,” Atilla Kart, a former member of the Turkish parliament told Rudaw.
“The prime minister was speaking with a kind of enthusiasm. He was talking about the union of the Mesopotamian spirit and the Caucasus, but the fact is that he has not been able to create the unity of peoples inside the country, let alone the wider region,” Kart said who has been a member of the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
The masterplan dubbed ‘Counterterrorism and Rehabilitation Action Plan’ consists of 10 items including economic revival of the southeast regions of the country (Bakur) where the Kurdish territories are located. According to the plan an estimated $9 billion will be spent to revive the relatively underdeveloped regions in the southeast.
But the plan got a lukewarm reception in the regions it wants to address. Critics say the plan is for the government to mislead the international opinion about the deteriorated Kurdish question in Turkey.
“This masterplan is a move to counter the international response to the Kurdish condition in Turkey,” Kemal Subhandaq who is a Kurdish researcher and writer told Rudaw. “The plan is a way to conceal the actions and the crimes against the Kurds,” he said.
The action plan shows no reconciliatory sign in regard to the ongoing conflict with the PKK and does not address the HDP, but “the people of the southeast.”
"First they will abandon arms, only then there may be an opportunity to talk to them," Davutoglu said referring to the PKK without giving further details.
Earlier last week the prime minister was quoted in Turkish media as saying that in the future talks would take place in Ankara instead of the Imrali island where PKK’s influential leader is jailed for life.
Both the Turkish government representatives and HDP mediators regularly met with Ocalan in Imrali prison since 2013 when a tentative ceasefire was reached, which collapsed in July 2015.
“It is important that the plan is addressing both economic condition and the state of mind of people,” Wehab Coskon from the Dicle University said.
“But time will tell if it is serious enough,” he added.
