It has now been more than a month since Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, called for his Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, to disband more than 40 years after it started its fight.
“The terrorist group laying down its arms is a victory for civilization,” deputy State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said. “It is the United States’s hope that this announcement will lead to increased stability for the region.”
Turkey says more than 40,000 people died in fighting, though like the casualty figures offered by the “Hamas Ministry of Health,” Turkey’s numbers were made from whole cloth, even as Western officials such as Pigott repeated them uncritically.
The active insurgency was primarily over by 1997, when the Clinton administration designated
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