Ocalan warns of fighting within Turkey

Condemned Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan has threatened that fighting between separatist Kurdish guerrillas and Turkish troops in northern Iraq could spread to Turkey, his lawyers said yesterday.

"We don't want war but if they come to us with the aim of extermination, we will use our legitimate right to self-defence, which is a universal right," the imprisoned Ocalan was quoted as saying in a statement faxed to Reuters.

Turkey maintains troops in northern Iraq, out of Baghdad's control since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, but denies reports it has recently sent reinforcements to fight some 5,000 Turkish Kurdish rebels it says are in the region.

But Turkey has said it offers technical support to two Iraqi Kurdish factions, Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which administer the breakaway Kurdish enclave.

"The latest developments in the south (northern Iraq) have both increased the risk of war and brought the possibility of that spreading into the whole area including the north (southeastern Turkey)," Ocalan's statement said.

Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has waged an armed campaign for self-rule since 1984 in which more than 30,000 people have died in southeastern Turkey. But clashes between the PKK and Turkish security forces have been reduced to sporadic skirmishes since Ocalan ordered his fighters to withdraw from Turkey last year after he was sentenced to death for treason in 1999.

He has urged the PKK instead to seek broad cultural rights through political means. The PUK and KDP, erstwhile rivals, have maintained an uneasy peace in northern Iraq since a ceasefire agreement brokered by the United States and signed in 1998.

That agreement also called for them to unite against the PKK and prevent it from setting up bases in the region. A KDP spokesman on Friday told Reuters KDP officials had met Talabani of the PUK in Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq last week.

"They discussed the points in the Washington agreement that are still problems," the spokesman said. He declined to say whether the Iraqi Kurdish leaders had discussed the PKK's presence in the breakaway region.

"All major issues between the two parties were discussed," he added. Talabani visited Ankara earlier this month to discuss cooperation with Turkey and to ask for economic aid. "What Talabani and Barzani should do is not provoke war, but mediate between Turkey and the PKK to find a democratic solution to the Kurdish problem," Ocalan said in the statement.

Turkey rejects Ocalan's peace overtures as a ruse to save his own life and vows to "neutralise" the guerrilla movement. Ocalan is being held on death row on an island prison in the Sea of Marmara where he is the only prisoner.

Turkey has said it will not carry out the death sentence while the European Court of Human Rights continues hearing an appeal by lodged by Ocalan.