Soon after Turgut Ozal, a former Turkish president, spoke in 1993 of an amnesty for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), 33 Turkish soldiers were killed by pkk rebels in an ambush. His hopes for lasting peace went up in smoke. There was a sense of deja vu on December 10th when the pkk claimed responsibility for the deaths of seven soldiers in Tokat, a Turkish nationalist stronghold in the north-east. The attack came soon after bold reforms by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party to improve the lot of the country's 14m-odd Kurds and perhaps end the PKK'S 25-year insurgency.
展开▼
