ANKARA, Turkey (AP & Reuters) - Turkey's prime minister rushed to the overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast and urged calm Monday after weeks of rioting, vowing that his government would investigate charges that security forces, and not Kurdish guerrillas, were behind a recent fatal bombing.

Allegations that undercover police carried out the bombing have raised accusations of state-backed summary executions and sparked street clashes in the southeast and then in Kurdish neighborhoods of Istanbul - violence in which four have died.

``Hate will not bring anything to us,'' Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd in Semdinli, the impoverished mountain town near the Iraqi border where the violence started. ``What will happen to this region after that?''

For decades, southeastern Turkey has been treated as a backwater province, and the appearance of a Turkish prime minister was likely to help calm tensions.

``Our government will follow this issue until the end,'' Erdogan said, referring to the bombing. ``Let's be calm in the face of these incidents.''

Also Monday, Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party announced that parliament on Wednesday would discuss tensions in the southeast.

Erdogan spoke in front of the governor's office as rooftop police snipers watched the crowd. Police wearing combat vests and carrying M-16 assault rifles stood behind him.

The bombing has raised the uncomfortable specter of security forces carrying out summary executions, a common practice in the early 1990s, when Kurdish rebels controlled large swaths of the southeast.

Those allegations are especially difficult now. The European Union agreed to start entry talks with Turkey last month and has been extremely critical of the country's human rights record.

But many were not convinced that Erdogan would be able to press forward with changes once he returned to the capital.

Erdogan's party, which has its roots in the Turkish Islamic and not nationalist movement, is popular in the southeast, and many analysts say that he may gain both at home and in the EU by confronting the military.

The army is still an extremely powerful institution, and the generals are deeply distrustful of Erdogan. Many fear he secretly harbors an Islamic agenda and could use incidents like that at Semdinli to promote his struggle with the fiercely secular military.

Authorities have detained at least one sergeant from the paramilitary police in connection with Nov. 9 bombing.

The incident that sparked the protests began when a bomb went off in front of a bookstore in Semdinli owned by a convicted member of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, the rebel group that has been battling Turkish security forces since 1984. One person was killed. The bookshop owner and bystanders chased the suspected bomber to a waiting car. The sergeant later detained was allegedly one of two paramilitary police in the car.

Highlighting the tensions, around 40,000 people attended the funerals of those killed in Yuksekova and tensions there were further fuelled as Turkish warplanes flew overhead.

The incident ``bears the marks of an assassination,'' Amnesty International said, calling on the state to investigate whether the bombing was part of a state security services policy targeting political opposition figures in the region.

In his speech, Erdogan also spoke of a new understanding of ethnicity in Turkey.

Turkey considers all Muslim citizens to be Turks, and many nationalists regard any expression of Kurdish identity to be a cover for trying to break apart the state along ethnic lines. That fear has been strengthened by the war in Iraq, which left Iraqi Kurds in control of an expanded enclave in the north of the country bordering Turkey.

"Whatever ethnic, religious or regional group we are part of we must live together hand-in-hand and shoulder-to-shoulder," he said, flanked by heavily armed special forces members.

``We are all citizens of the Republic of Turkey under that upper identity. We all have sub identities ... no one should be offended from this. A Kurd can say 'I am a Kurd' ... no one can be treated according to his identity,'' Erdogan said.