Turkish military police remove statue of PKK militant
By court order, Turkish gendarmerie brought down a statue of Mahsum Korkmaz, the PKK militant who took part in this terror group’s first attack on Turkish soil in 1984.
On Aug. 19, fighting broke out in Lice, Diyarbakir between the Turkish gendarmerie and Kurdish protesters. The latter were trying to block the removal of a statue of a Kurdish fighter at the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) cemetery. When asked about the fighting, Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said it was an attempt to derail the government’s peace process with the Kurdish militants. “What [happened] today was necessary. We can’t tolerate such incidents. As one in charge of the peace process, I can say that we see this as direct provocation,” he said, stressing that the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HDP) agrees with the government that the statue’s placement was a provocation.
Turkey’s Interior Ministry released a written statement on its website, in one sentence: “The statue that was placed at Yolcati village crossing in Lice, Diyarbakir, was removed at early morning hours on Aug. 19, 2014, by the gendarmerie forces.”
