US launches fresh anti-PKK initiative in Europe

Turkey of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s is in the past, official says to praise democracy

U.S. authorities have recently visited several Western European capitals in an effort to persuade those nations to cut off the terrorist Kurdistan Workers Party's (PKK) finances and to prevent the group from using Europe as a base of operations, a top counterterrorism official at the State Department said.

Meanwhile, another senior State Department official praised Ankara's democratic transformation in recent years, saying that Turkey now was not the country that it was in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

Turkey's military conducted three coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and the remarks by Dan Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, were a thinly veiled reference to a recent debate in Ankara over "the possibility of a coup in 2007."

The debate was prompted by an article by Zeyno Baran, a Turkey specialist at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank here, that appeared in the international edition of newsweek Newsweek late last month. Baran said another coup was possible next year at a time when the military was deeply concerned over alleged efforts by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government to undermine secularism,

But Fried said that Turkey was undergoing a profound democratic transformation.

"Turkey of the '60s, '70s, '80s, is in the past," Fried told a small group of reporters on Tuesday, according to the Anatolia news agency. "Turkey remains a secular republic, and democracy is deepening."

He also reiterated Washington's backing for Turkey's eventual European Union membership, saying he hoped the accession process would still go ahead despite an ongoing rift between Ankara and Washington.

At a summit meeting later this week, EU leaders are expected to suspend eight of the 35 policy chapters in Turkey's accession negotiations because of the dispute on Cyprus.

On the PKK matter, Frank Urbancic, the State Department's principal deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, said in an interview with the Turkish Daily News that he and other officials from the State Department, the Justice Department and the Treasury Department visited Europe late last month for anti-PKK talks.

"Frankly, PKK terrorism is something very poorly understood in Western Europe, and it's very much not known in the United States," he said.

"We're trying to find mechanisms that we can jointly use against the PKK to cut down their ability to fund," Urbancic said. "But we also want to stop their use of Europe, primarily Western Europe, as a base of operations."

He said there was some progress, and that the talks would continue early next year.

U.S. officials did not give the number and names of countries Urbancic had visited for anti-PKK purposes because of the sensitivity of planned measures, but said the U.S. effort covered several countries.

"Unhappily, terrorists are very effective people. They have great networks which span borders and even continents," Urbancic complained, adding the PKK, an organization like "an octopus," had not only a terrorist branch, but also branches for money laundering, extortion, killing political opponents and drug trafficking. "We're trying to attack the entire problem," he said.

He declined to criticize any country directly, but said that "we believe [the PKK] should not be allowed to launch propaganda campaigns from any territory, including our own," when asked to comment on the case of Denmark, from where Roj TV, a PKK mouthpiece, is broadcasting despite Turkey's protests.

In the wake of increased PKK attacks against Turkish security forces and civilians, Turkey warned in July that it could send its military to neighboring northern Iraq to eliminate terrorist bases there, prompting Washington to pledge a larger anti-PKK effort.

The United States in late August appointed retired Gen. Joseph Ralston, a former NATO supreme commander, as special envoy for countering the PKK.

Ralston mainly deals with the Iraqi dimension of the PKK problem, Urbancic said, while he himself is working with European countries.

Urbancic said that a fledgling cease-fire announced by the PKK in early October did not mean much, and urged the terrorist group to lay down its arms. "We're determined to get [the PKK] shut down. That's all there's to say. The violence must stop," he said. (The Anatolia news agency contributed to this report.)

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