Play VideoThree Kurdish women activists ‘executed’ in Paris
A woman who helped found the
Kurdish PKK rebel movement and two other women were found shot dead in
Paris overnight after execution-style killings that cast a shadow over
peace moves between Turkey and the guerrillas.
The bodies of Sakine Cansiz, a founder of the Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) in the early 1980s, and her two fellow activists
were found in the early hours of Thursday at an institute in the French
capital that has close links to the PKK.
They appeared to have been shot in the head, a French
police source said. Kurdish media said one woman was also shot in the
abdomen. Workers had broken in to the room at the Information Centre of
Kurdistan after seeing blood stains on a door.
Cansiz was a prominent PKK figure, initially as a
fighter and later in charge of the group's civil affairs in Europe,
according to a Kurdish lawyer who knew her. A 1995 photograph shows her
standing next to militant leader Abdullah Ocalan, wearing olive battle
fatigues and clutching an assault rifle.
Ocalan is now in a Turkish jail and the killings came
shortly after Turkey announced it had resumed peace negotiations with
him - something likely to anger hardliners within the PKK.
French investigators gave no immediate indication of
who might be behind the murders; the PKK has seen intermittent internal
feuding during an armed campaign in the mountainous Turkish southeast
that has killed some 40,000 people since 1984.
Turkish nationalist militants have in the past also
been accused of killing Kurdish activists, who want regional autonomy.
But such incidents have been confined to Turkey.
"The choice of Cansiz as a target is because she was
symbolic of the Kurdish movement," said Franck Cecen, a Kurdish lawyer
in Paris who met Cansiz at least half a dozen times and described her as
exceptionally well-spoken and well-educated.
"She had been one of its founding members, she had
spent years in prison for her convictions, and she had become a
historical figure," he told Reuters, adding that he found it hard to
believe fellow Kurds would have taken her life.
"It is difficult to imagine that this was done by a
Kurdish cell," he said. "Everyone is talking about a Turkish role."
ERDOGAN
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said it was too
early to apportion blame: "This may be an internal reckoning," he said.
"We are engaged in a struggle against terrorism. We want to make
progress, but there are people who don't want this. This could be a
provocative undertaking by these people."
The killings came shortly after Erdogan's government
announced it had resumed talks with Ocalan, who has been confined on a
prison island near Istanbul since 1999. Talks to end the conflict would
almost certainly raise tensions within the Kurdish movement over demands
and terms of any ceasefire.
Among a crowd that gathered behind police lines at the
Paris Kurdish institute were onlookers chanting slogans and waving
yellow flags bearing Ocalan's likeness. France is home tens of thousands
of Kurdish immigrants, of who some are PKK activists.
"Rest assured that French authorities are determined to
get to the bottom of these unbearable acts," French Interior Minister
Manuel Valls said at the scene, adding the killings were "surely an
execution". His predecessor, Claude Gueant, said Turkey's engagement in
the peace process led him to conclude it was unlikely that Ankara's
agents were behind the killings.
Any Turkish government contacts with the PKK, deemed a
terrorist group by Ankara, Washington and the European Union, are highly
controversial in the Turkish political establishment.
Last year, the months preceding the move to talks, saw
some of the worst bloodshed of the three-decades-old conflict.
Television footage of soldiers' coffins returning home draped in the red
Turkish flag inflamed nationalist tensions.
Valls identified one of the victims as the head of the
Information Centre and said homicide and anti-terrorism units had been
assigned to investigate the murders. A police source confirmed that all
held Turkish citizenship.
The two victims other than Cansiz were named as Fidan Dogan, 28, and Leyla Soylemez, 25.
POLITICAL CRIME
"This is a political crime, there is no doubt about
it," Remzi Kartal, a leader of the Kurdistan National Congress, an
umbrella group of Kurdish organizations in Europe, told Reuters.
"Ocalan and the Turkish government have started a peace
process, they want to engage in dialogue, but there are parties that
are against resolving the Kurdish question and want to sabotage the
peace process," he said.
The Kurdish question has taken on a particular urgency
with the rise of Kurdish groups in Iraq, where they have self-rule in
the north, and in Syria. Turkey fears Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
could encourage Kurds to feed militancy in Turkey.
Many Turks fear such autonomy as the PKK is seeking
could stoke demands for an independent Kurdish homeland, within Turkey
and beyond its borders, that would undermine the Turkish state.
The Firat news agency, which is close to the PKK, said
another of the three victims was the Paris representative of the
Brussels-based Kurdistan National Congress. It said the murder weapon
was believed to have been fitted with a silencer.
"A couple of colleagues saw blood stains at the door.
When they broke the door open and entered they saw the three women had
been executed," French Kurdish Associations Federation Chairman Mehmet
Ulker was reported as saying by Firat.
Female militants have played a significant role in the
PKK's insurgency, partly reflecting a principle of equality within the
group's Marxist ideology. In some cases, desire to avenge the killing of
other family members was the motivation for joining, for others it was a
way out of family repression, analysts say.
The government and PKK have agreed a framework for a
peace plan, according to Turkish media reports, in talks which would
have been unthinkable in Turkey only a few years ago. Ocalan is widely
reviled by Turks who hold him responsible for a conflict that burns at
the heart of the nation.
Erdogan has introduced some reforms allowing Kurdish
language broadcasting and some other concessions on language; but
activists are demanding more freedom in education and administration.
CANSIZ
Several members of the Kurdish community in Paris said
that Cansiz, who was in her 50s, was an emblematic figure who had been
imprisoned in Turkey before obtaining asylum in France.
"She was in charge of communicating information on
events in Turkey, she would denounce arbitrary arrests, unsolved
murders," said a member of the Arts and Culture Academy of Kurdistan who
asked not to be identified.
Turkish political analyst Emre Uslu, who previously
worked in Turkey's counter-terrorism police unit, said in a blog that
the killing of Cansiz could point to a split within the PKK.
He said Cansiz was a leading member of a faction within
the PKK that had in the past opposed Ocalan's moves towards peace.
"For Turkey to sit down with the PKK before its
internal problems are solved is considerably problematic," Uslu said.
Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy (BDP) party,
two of whose members were allowed to pay a rare visit last week to
Ocalan, condemned the killings: "We call on our people to hold protest
meetings wherever they are to condemn this massacre and stand up for the
Kurdish people's martyrs," its leaders said.
