Turkey’s government has won international praise for efforts to end a bitter dispute with Armenia and expand rights for Kurds, but a fierce battle is brewing at home over the highly charged issues.
Parliamentary sources said the government will put the two issues before lawmakers soon after they resume legislative work on Tuesday — five days after parliament re-opens. But it will have a tough time winning over opposition parties that have already raised objections to both projects.
For Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the two issues are of utmost importance to the nation’s standing on the international arena, but they could also cost him politically at home.
His government has been accused at home of making concessions that damage Turkey’s interests and of selling out Azerbaijan, which is locked in conflict with Armenia over the breakaway enclave of Nagorny Karabakh.
Turkey has long refused to establish diplomatic links with Armenia over Yerevan’s efforts to have World War I-era massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks recognised as genocide — a label Turkey rejects.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were systematically killed between 1915 and 1917, and the massacres have been recognized as a genocide by France, Canada and the European parliament.
Reconciliation between Ankara and Yerevan would bolster Turkey’s bid to join the EU, as would a government plan to introduce measures to boost the rights of the Kurdish minority and erode support for a campaign by Kurdistan Workers’ Party rebels for self-rule.
The government remains tight-lipped on the contents of the package, but media reports say it may include steps to lift restrictions on teaching Kurdish in schools, renaming Kurdish villages that have Turkish names and allowing campaigning in Kurdish. Ankara could also open the way for the return of some 12,000 Turkish Kurds exiled in northern Iraq. Kurdish activists, on the other hand, want the government to recognize the Kurdish identity and culture in the Constitution, a proposal that Erdogan has rejected.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate