German Mountaineers Kidnapped
From Today’s Zaman:
Members of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) on Tuesday kidnapped three German mountaineers as they were climbing Mt. Agri (Ararat), the governor of the eastern Anatolian province of Agri announced yesterday.
The three Germans were nabbed from a group of 13 mountaineers by five PKK terrorists, who raided their camp at an altitude of 3,200 meters on Mt. Agri, Governor Mehmet Cetin told the Anatolia news agency yesterday…. He emphasized that teams from the provincial gendarmerie have launched a wide-scale search operation in the region…
“The terrorists said they carried out this action because of the German government’s recent moves against PKK associations and sympathizers,” Anatolia quoted the governor as saying, in an apparent reference to the fact that the Denmark-based Roj TV station, one of the main propaganda tools of the PKK, was recently banned in Germany because of its support for the PKK’s terrorist activities against Turkey.
Yet in Ankara, officials from the Foreign Ministry, while acknowledging that the three mountaineers were captured around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, were not yet able to confirm that the mountaineers were kidnapped by the PKK…
Kidnapping tourists is a rare tactic for the PKK, whose activities are mainly focused on attacking military targets in southeastern Turkey….
The PKK, listed by the United States and Turkey as a terrorist group, took up arms against Turkey in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic homeland in the Southeast. About 40,000 people have been killed in the more than two-decade-long conflict.
Since December of last year the Turkish military has been regularly attacking PKK positions in the mountains of northern Iraq, where several thousand PKK terrorists are believed to be based….
The EU, which Turkey aims to join, has meanwhile urged Ankara to boost the language and cultural rights of its Kurdish citizens and to do more to develop the economy of the Southeast, long hamstrung by the PKK conflict.
Late last month, German officials announced that Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble had banned Roj TV’s broadcast activities in Germany as of June 19. Announcing the ban, the Interior Ministry said Roj TV was a mouthpiece of the PKK, which has been outlawed in Germany and has used armed force in pursuit of autonomy for ethnic Kurdish regions of Turkey.
In addition to Roj TV, several so-called cultural groups in Europe have been used as propaganda tools by the PKK. Turkey frequently criticizes European countries for turning a blind eye to PKK activities in their territory and has urged, so far in vain, Denmark to revoke Roj TV’s broadcast license in that country.
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