According to a reliable source to Iranian Kurdistan Human Rights Watch, a team of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) led by Zubeyr Aydar – member of the PKK Executive Council (KCK) and resident in Europe – in Norway met a team from the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) and reached an agreement. According to the source, the results of the talks were announced to the PKK leadership council in Qandil last month. Given that the axes of the agreement have been extremely beneficial to Turkey and to the detriment of the Kurds, it was faced with discontent from a number of commanders and members, including Ms Esma Erat, the commander of the Kurdistan Free Women’s Party (PAJK), the PKK’s special women’s party.
According to the source, the commander said that these agreements, like previous Oslo agreements, were nothing but to surrender to Turkish demands, and we know that Turkey’s behavior has not only changed but also accelerated. Ms Erat emphasized that the talks should not be done with the intelligence and secretly, if Turkey really intends to open a path to the Kurdish issue, it should be a political and public solution because there is no guarantee for intelligence agreements – as in the past.
Iranian Kurdistan Human Rights Watch Mis Esama Erat threatened to split her party from the PKK if the current PKK practice of dealing with Turkish intelligence and secrecy continues. Later that day, the whereabouts of this senior PKK commander were reported to the Turkish intelligence authorities and immediately targeted and killed. The source’s words could not be confirmed nor denied, but the source provided us with numerous cases of opposition removal records in the PKK that we are investigating.
Several senior and former PKK members have reported on internal killings, including those involving co-ordination with Turkish intelligence, and sone have even published books detailing the identities, locations and timing of their killings. German Helmut Oberdik (in a study called Killing Dissidents in the PKK), Selim Curukkaya (former member and a PKK founder in the book Apo’s Verses), Aytkin Yilmaz (former member in the book Killin Your Friend) ), Lalesh Qaso (a former PKK member in a series of articles), Aliza Marcus (a former Reuters reporter in Istanbul in the book Blood and Belief) have detailed PKK internal killings.
