|
PKK uses children not only in Turkey but Europe too. The following article explains the details.
http://www.turknorthamerica.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1348
KURDISH TERRORIST ORGANIZATION PKK
and
Child Recruitment and Deployment
The PKK is based in Turkey but has camps in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon and in the district of Makhmur in the Kurdish area of Iraq. Smaller camps are still operational in very mountainous terrain close to the Turkish and Iranian borders.
From 1994, it appears that the PKK started to systematically recruit more and more children and even created children´s regiments. It was claimed, for example, that a children´s battalion named Tabura Zaroken Sehit Agit was composed of three divisions and was, in theory at least, run by a committee of five children aged between 8 and 12 years. Both boys and girls are recruited by the PKK. In 1998, it was reported that the PKK had 3,000 children within its ranks, more than 10 per cent of whom were girls. The youngest child witnessed with the PKK was 7 years old.
The PKK was reported to have lost as many as 1,000 guerrillas during a battle with the Kurdish Democratic Party in 1995. Many boys and girls were among the victims, according to KDP sources. In 1997, a 14-year-old girl was one of several female guerrillas taken prisoner by the Turkish army during an offensive in Turkey´s Cudi mountains. She had joined the PKK the previous year and had received political and military training at a PKK camp in northern Iraq. She was a Syrian national.
Some disturbing reports have been released on recruitment practices of the PKK in Western Europe. During the summer of 1998, Rädda Barnen learnt of PKK recruitment drives in Swedish schools. Seventeen minors were invited to attend a ´summer camp´ in July in northern Sweden before being recruited to serve the PKK in south-east Turkey. By mid-August 1998, only three of them had returned. Many families have reported their children missing to the police.
A French magazine reported recently on the activities of the PKK in Kurdish communities living in France (about 100,000 people). The French police estimate the number of active PKK members at 300. In addition to taxes imposed on their incomes, some Kurdish families have to support the struggle by giving up their own children. Up to now, no family has formally complained to the police, instead preferring to claim that their child has run away. The PKK uses ‘cultural associations’ in order to indoctrinate these children, most during 15 days in a camp in the Larzac (South of France). The oldest have to follow the ‘big training period’ which takes place outside the child´s country. There, youths receive paramilitary training and the toughest go to the frontline after a final training at the Iranian border.
In Germany, the Police of Bielefeld have inquired into the activities of the PKK in Ostwestfalen-Lippe. In addition to other activities such as racketeering and drug smuggling, the PKK has also forced children, teenagers and youths to join ‘political courses’ for a few days. Sometimes these course have taken place abroad, notably in Belgium and in the Netherlands. It seems that this usually happened with the consent of parents. One girl who had been kidnapped was returned by the police after enquiries among members of the PKK. Two other children are still missing and one other child is believed to be missing. All these children are below the age of 14 years.
Reports have been received from other cities in Germany. On a number of occasions, the German NGO, the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV), has denounced the abduction of children by the PKK in Germany. In Celle, for example, it was reported that Kurdish parents of children who have died in hostilities or who are still fighting have been honoured during a PKK celebration in March 1998. On 22 November 1998, the criminal police of Hanover reported that three more children had been trained for guerrilla in camps in the Netherlands and Belgium.
The GfbV also reported that thousands of parents in many Western countries are mourning their children who have died in combat or whose children have been abducted. It said that messages encouraging the recruitment of children have been released on MED-TV, the PKK´s satellite television. In Cologne, the German Coalition has been informed of a case of a 16-year-old Kurdish girl who is still missing since March 1999 after having joined a cultural meeting in a Kurdish centre.
According to the Turkish authorities, similar abductions have also occurred in Armenia, including three children who were abducted in Yerevan.
TURKISH AMERICAN SECURITY FOUNDATION
Be a Man PKK, Don’t Use The Children.
|
Or is there another level of "doing something" that I need to reach before I´m allowed to have an opinion? 
