At a press conference in Silopi at 9.30 AM with DTP chairmen Ahmet Türk and Emine Ayna, the DTP leaders said the peace groups shouldn’t be arrested or seen as ‘people who surrender’. Ahmet Türk said the initiative shows the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) wants peace.
Two ‘peace groups’ are expected to arrive at the Habur border gate in the coming hours and are heading to Duhok, an accident delayed the arrival of the convoy. One of the members of the Makhmur peace group died in a car accident near Erbil.
The first one will consists out of 26 refugees from the Makhmur refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. Among them are 4 children, 9 women and 13 men. Some of them are students from the Kurdish Salahaddin University in Erbil.
Another peace group will come from the PKK camps in Qandil mountains and will consist of 4 women guerrilla’s and 4 male guerrilla’s. The group left Qandil mountains at 7 AM after a short farewell ceremony. The senior PKK leader Bozan Tekin also attended the ceremony.
The third group will consists of 100 lawyers from Europe and will arrive at the Istanbul Atatürk Airport today, but the time is not clear yet.
Today’s Zaman reported that Türk and Ayna in a written statement over the weekend urged the government to benefit from the “peace and solution” opportunity and asked the government not to “repeat the same mistake of 1999.”
The Turkish newspaper Taraf wrote that the DTP contacted officials of the Turkish Interior Ministry and the officials promised that the surrendering group would be released within four hours of being screened. Taraf also claimed a governor would be sent to monitor the ‘surrendering process’ (Photo: ANF).
Source: Rudaw
