Erdogan vows no retreat from democratic initiative

Speaking at his party's parliamentary group meeting yesterday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said any backtracking on the National Unity and Brotherhood Project initiative launched last year to extend more cultural rights to Turkey's citizens of Kurdish origin would amount to succumbing to terrorism. He stated that the government had not launched the democratic initiative for the terrorist organization PKK, saying that giving up the initiative would mean betraying the country's children. "If we give up the initiative, that means terrorism has won," he warned. He said those behind recent terrorist attacks want Turkey to seem like a Third World country in the eyes of the world. Erdogan also dismissed calls for early elections. "Mothers don't want to hear about early elections or martial law; they want to hear a solution," he stated. He harshly rebuffed a call from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) to reinstate martial law to the southeast region, which ended in the early 2000s, saying that this call is tantamount to surrendering to the language of terrorism. Erdogan said violence means the loss of reason. "Where there is violence, there is no reason," he said. "If violence is in play, logic is out." He said they would not succumb to the language of violence. He also briefed deputies on his visit to the Gediktepe district of Hakkari, where 11 soldiers were killed in a weekend terrorist PKK attack on an outpost. He said he saw the nobility and courage of Turkish War of Independence-era soldiers in the soldiers serving in the east and southeast. He stated that these security forces are selflessly waging the war against terrorism under the hardest of conditions. Erdogan said the government is doing everything necessary to fight the war on terror, adding that this is a long-term endeavor.