Turkey prepares for a Kurdish bloodbath: Guerrillas strike in 20 European cities as Ankara masses 100,000 troops to wipe the PKK off the map

AN EXPLANATION for the most violent attacks yet by Turkish Kurds on their country's embassies, airlines and banks throughout Europe yesterday lies deep in the worsening troubles of south-eastern Turkey.

For weeks, Turkish army reinforcements have been building up ready to launch the Turkish state's most ruthless campaign yet to eradicate the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) guerrillas who are seeking to establish an independent Kurdistan.

'It's now just a question of when it starts,' said one Turkish official. A bloodbath is a near certainty. Already, 10 to 30 people are dying every day.

The campaign will pit some 100,000 Turkish troops against about 4,000 Turkish Kurdish guerrillas. In fact, 'final' offensives in the south-east have become routine in a nine-year-old insurgency that has killed at least 6,200 people. The only change is the rising annual death toll, and the big losers are always the increasingly desperate south-eastern Kurdish civilian population of about 6 million.

Yesterday's attacks on Turkish offices in Europe - almost certainly planned by the Kurdish rebels - are to highlight claims to Western support because of Turkish violations of Kurdish human rights. A total of about 12 million of Turkey's 60 million people are Kurds, although half that number live in the West.

A claim for sympathy is well-based. Turkish troops have set Kurd against Kurd with a militia system of 'Village Guards'. Kurds accuse the security forces of shooting first and asking questions later, emptying and burning hundreds of villages and backing shady death squads that have killed hundreds of Kurdish militants.

They also complain that, after the untimely death of the progressive President Turgut Ozal, Turkey failed to respond adequately to a unilateral ceasefire announced in March by the rebel commander, Abdullah Ocalan.

Mr Ozal did allow Kurds to speak their Indo-European mother tongue in private for the first time in 1991. But, insisting that anybody who calls themselves a Turk suffers no discrimination, Ankara refused to grant Kurdish freedoms in politics, education or the electronic media.

International groups have frequently condemned Turkey's actions. Indeed Turkey's brutal suppression of the Kurds is probably the main reason for the widespread sympathy felt by the local population for the rebels.

But the Turks do not have a monopoly on human rights violations. The situation is different from northern Iraq, where President Saddam Hussein killed 180,000 Kurds out of a population of 4 million and razed 4,000 Kurdish villages and towns.

The ceasefire announced by the Turkish Kurds was indeed abused by the Turkish military, but it broke down mainly because the Syrian-based rebels massacred more than 30 unarmed Turkish recruits in civilian clothes on 24 May.

Turkish Kurdish rebels are now back to burning Turkish schools, health centres and road-building equipment. Kurdish kangaroo courts hang 'collaborators' from lamp-posts. Rebel guerrillas have gone back to killing civilians, last night murdering two more Turkish village school-teachers. Women, children and even babies of pro-government 'Village Guards' are being killed with increasing frequency.

'We are fighting a very hard battle. Do you think they don't shoot us in cold blood?' said one guerrilla called Veli.

Turkish Kurds maintain several offices and bases in the area controlled by Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas, but appear to have honoured a vow not to launch attacks on Turkey from there. One of a couple of recent 'attacks' claimed by Turkey was in fact a group of Iraqi Kurdish smugglers, Iraqi Kurdish officials say. Five smugglers were killed.

Battalions of Turkish tanks, armoured cars and back-up vehicles are standing by at the main road entrance to northern Iraq ready to repeat its October invasion in pursuit of the rebels, but that seems unlikely to be needed. Iraqi Kurds are mostly sympathetic to the Turkish rebels but Iraqi Kurdish guerrilla chiefs, who receive secret subsidies and supplies from Turkey, are keeping the radical Turkish Kurdish militants at arm's length.

The brunt of the new operation is likely to be in south-eastern Turkey. In just a few hours on one main road on Tuesday, I counted more than 40 busloads of fresh Turkish commandos heading towards the mountains. Another 20 trucks, apparently carrying ammunition, followed later.

Accompanying them were more than 40 civilian trucks with supplies. But their drivers had removed or covered up their number plates. They know that the guerrillas have survived big offensives in the past and have taken their revenge.

(Photographs and map omitted)