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.”
The Turkish General Staff detailed the incident, stating that about 250 separatist militants attacked the gendarmerie with bazookas, infantry rifles and homemade explosives, forcing troops to “immediately respond.” The statement said that the military vehicles were hit by many bullets, and that the two military helicopters monitoring the operation also received fire. When the helicopters returned fire, the firefight ended, the military said, noting that the troops returned to their base safely — with the exception that Sgt. Ugur Inal was injured during the operation and died at the hospital.
Haldun Solmazturk, a retired brigadier general in the Turkish army who served for many years in that particular region, said the General Staff had no duty to make a statement on this incident, and that it should have left it to the government to inform the public. “The General Staff has been making statements about issues relating to local security matters for some time that fall under the responsibility of the Interior Ministry, that is, the governors and the district governors,” he told Al-Monitor, drawing attention to the Aug. 18 statement from the Diyarbakir governor’s office announcing a legal battle against the raising of the statue.
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