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Kurdish party sees Turkey election success Reuters Aug 9, 2002 Turkey's main Kurdish party wants to increase its role in government, welcoming newly passed human rights reforms but wanting more freedoms for the 12-million-strong minority, a leading Kurdish politician said. Campaigning for an early November election is well underway in Muslim Turkey, where Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's fragile right-left coalition government caved in last month. Feridun Celik, mayor of Diyarbakir, Turkey's largest mainly Kurdish city, told Reuters that he believed his People's Democracy Party (HADEP) would win the 10 percent of the vote in November to enter parliament, after failing to do so in 1999. "The EU reforms are an important step but serious steps have still to be taken...We want to present our proposals to other parties in parliament and work to implement them," he said. "We are ready for the general elections and believe we have the necessary support (to enter parliament)," Celik said. The sweeping rights package passed last week was backed by the European Union as a condition for Turkey to begin membership talks. Among other things, it gave the Kurds for the first time the rights to education and broadcasting in their mother tongue. Diyarbakir is home to more than one million people, many of them Kurds forced to leave their villages during decades of fighting between Turkey's military, the second-largest standing army in NATO, and separatist Kurdish rebels. A top court is weighing charges HADEP acts as a front for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels, blamed by Ankara for the deaths of more than 30,000 people in 17 years of fighting. HADEP denies any links to the PKK and says it targets a broad electorate. Many see a ban as unlikely before polls. Turkey's constitution, drawn up after a military coup in 1980, bars political parties from setting up under ethnic or religious lines, but a constitutional amendment parliament legislated last year makes it harder to shut a party down. THORNY ISSUE Celik's offices lie between the palatial residence of Diyarbakir's governor, charged with implementing emergency rule backed by thousands of soldiers, and a military airport running sorties against the PKK in nearby mountains. Waning violence has brought relaxed security, meaning HADEP can campaign in outlying towns and villages where it was banned from organising in the past. Diyarbakir is still under emergency rule, as is one other southeast province, but Ankara plans to lift it entirely by November as it works to start EU membership talks. "HADEP's contribution to democracy will be a very important one...The lifting of emergency rule will be an important step (but) the region needs serious reform," Celik says. HADEP has long called for an end to bans on propagating a separate Kurdish culture and language. It also supports a return to the villages and administrative reform, transferring some powers from central to local government, to boost prosperity. "I'm going to vote for HADEP in the elections...They will better defend our rights in language, education and the economy. We have no expectations from this government," said Ramazan, a local cattle farmer. Parliament may have passed the EU reforms, but many in Turkey are uneasy about Kurdish political power. The measures were seen until recently as inspired by forces undermining national unity. Some politicians, including the prime minister, still warn HADEP is a separatist group threatening stability. And the powerful military, wielding a "guiding hand" over politics, has also expressed worry over HADEP's popularity. But many residents of Diyarbakir, facing emergency rule and a nationwide economic crisis, say their day-to-day struggle supersedes dreams of Kurdish rights. "Our main
problems are now poverty and theft. I'll vote for the politician who works
hardest for Diyarbakir and it doesn't matter which party he's from," said
Mustafa, a carpet seller in the city's souk.
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