Violence resumes between Turkey and the PKK
The recent increase in terrorist attacks against Turkey has coincided with the PKK’s announcement that it was cancelling a unilateral cease-fire, following military actions by the Turkish army. While all of the broadsheets except The Daily Telegraph have covered the most recent violence, other sources suggest that the conflict between the two sides has been raging for several months, unreported.
For example, the only coverage of fighting between the two sides in May were three articles that appeared on the BBC News website. These articles covered two attacks by Kurdish rebels (one on a naval base, the other on an army outpost, both in Turkey near the Iraqi border), as well as of a Turkish bombing campaign against Kurdish targets in Iraq.
It was only towards June that the broadsheets also began to cover the renewed fighting, with The Guardian and The Financial Times each including an article on the increased hostilities. On the 17 June The Guardian published ‘ Turkish troops’ incursion may raise tensions’(Associated Press), which described how ‘hundreds of elite Turkish troops’ had killed Kurdish rebels in Iraq, with a single reference to the violence in May: ‘Turkey killed at least 19 Kurdish rebels in an airstrike on rebel hideouts in northern Iraq.’ The Financial Times on the other hand, in ‘Turkey puts Kurd activists on trial’ (Delphine Strauss), gave some details of recent Kurdish attacks (‘About 35 soldiers have died in the past two months in clashes with PKK fighters’), but did not mention the bombing campaign.
More coverage was given to the speech by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, where he stated that Kurdish rebels would ‘drown in their own blood’, and that the ‘blood of martyrs is in every piece of this territory’, with The Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times all reporting that he remained defiant in the wake of a Kurdish attack on a military outpost near the Iraqi border that left several soldiers and militants dead. While all three outlets reported that the PKK had cancelled its ceasefire, only The Financial Times (Delphine Strauss) reported on the scale of violence in the past month, noting that ‘The military warned on Friday that violence could increase and said more than 40 soldiers and 140 rebels had died in the past four months.’ (This quote was also mentioned in this BBC News article.) The article in The Times (Alexander Christie-Miller) was also the first piece of coverage to include a quote from a PKK member, with Ahmed Denis giving his opinion that Turkey was ‘not sincere in dealing with the Kurdish issue and doesn’t want to deal with this issue peacefully.’
Tuesday’s bomb near Istanbul prompted the most widespread coverage, with The Independent, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Times all reporting on the attack. All of the coverage either referred to very recent violence ( i.e. The Times: ‘The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) claimed responsibility for the attack, the second on security forces in Istanbul in the past month’), or to the worsening of the situation in general (i.e The Financial Times: ‘The attack came shortly after some of the worst fighting for years in the south-east of the country,’). None of the bomb attack coverage gave specific details about the duration and intensity of the violence between the two sides.
The absence of reporting on several months of conflict was underlined by two analysis pieces. In The Guardian, Simon Tisdall’s ‘Turkey’s ‘zero problems’ policy is a flop’ listed the various foreign policy challenges that Turkey’s ruling AKP party were now facing, from rapprochement with Armenia, to suspicions that it is becoming too close to Iran. Opening with discussion of ‘the Kurdish question’, Tisdall mentioned the ‘surge in violence pitting Turkish forces against Kurdish separatists’ – but the link that The Guardian provided for background on this surge was this article from a day earlier, underscoring that the broadsheets had only recently started covering it. Similarly, Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Independent that the ‘resumption of guerrilla warfare brings to a final end an unofficial truce between the PKK and the government’, in an article entitled ‘Istanbul bomb marks end of Kurdish ceasefire’. The handful of articles from the BBC website, and the quote from the Turkish general, however, suggests that the unofficial truce between the two sides had been over for some time.
The recent spate of coverage highlights how the media can present a series of events as a breaking story, whereas in reality they are a continuation of a violent conflict that happens to be occurring in a region that receives little to no attention by the mainstream broadsheets.