“Democracy cannot eradicate terror but can decrease its popular support... The era of those who know no other tool than the truncheon is long gone,” Diyarbakir Governor Efkan Ala said in an interview with the Milliyet newspaper on Sunday.
The riots, the worst urban unrest in the mainly Kurdish southeast for years, broke out in Diyarbakir Tuesday and spread to other areas, claiming eight lives, including three children.
Authorities say the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group blacklisted as terrorist by Ankara, the European Union and the United States, which has been fighting for Kurdish self-rule in the region since 1984, orchestrated the violence.
The conflict, at its peak in the 1990s, has claimed some 37,000 lives.
Ala argued that the riots, which saw angry youths torch government buildings and banks, vandalize shops and attack the police with petrol bombs and stones, was a violent PKK reaction to the erosion of its popular support following democratic reforms by Ankara.
The riots shuttered a relative calm in the region in the past several years during which Ankara, eager to boost its EU bid, granted the Kurds a measure of cultural freedoms and lifted a 15-year emergency rule in the southeast.
“They (the PKK) expected that the state would react with its old reflexes and the conflict would grow,” Ala said. “But their expectations did not materialize... Now they will try other methods.”
Compared to much more hardline practices in the past, the response of the security forces was more controlled this time, apparently to keep relations on an even keel with the EU, and local Kurds were more vocal in their disproval of the violence.
Ala said the riots should not discourage the government from pressing ahead with democratic reforms in the region and ruled out a return to a state of emergency as a solution.
“A democratic state does not decide what rights to give to its citizens depending on terror,” he said, citing as an example the inauguration of the first private Kurdish-language broadcasts in the region last week.
Kurdish activists say Ankara’s reforms are unevenly implemented and inadequate, and criticize the government for failing to address the region’s rampant poverty.
They also urge an amnesty for PKK rebels to encourage them to lay down their arms.