The Turkish government has submitted the motion for a cross-border operation to fight against the banned Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) to the parliament, government spokesman and Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek said on Monday.

 

After about six hour's meeting of the Council of Ministers, Cicek told reporters that the Anti-Terror Supreme Board made a decision regarding preparation for a motion allowing Turkish Armed Forces to launch a cross-border operation in its last meeting.

 

"Ministers decided on submission of this motion to the parliament as of Monday. Prime minister and ministers signed the motion. I expect that it will be debated in the parliament this week," Cicek said.

 

"Our wish is that we will not have to use this motion... but the most painful reality of our country, our region, is terror," said Cicek.

 

Cicek indicated that the motion was only targeted at the PKK, adding that it would be valid for one year.

 

Meanwhile, Iraq's Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi will arrive in Istanbul on Tuesday morning and later proceed to Ankara for a visit to Turkey.

 

On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey has long been seeking the cooperation of Iraq and the United States in its fight against the PKK, but there has been no crackdown on the rebels.

 

Mentioning a recent anti-terrorism deal signed with Iraq, Erdogan said it was not valid since it had not been approved by Iraq's parliament yet.

 

Turkey's Supreme Anti-Terror Board convened last Tuesday, issuing a fresh warning of a possible cross-border incursion into northern Iraq to chase separatist rebels and the government sent a request for approval to parliament which is expected to make decision as early as this week.

 

Officials and analysts had warned that the possibility for across-border operation into Iraq would increase after the US Congress passed a resolution backing Armenian allegations of genocide at the hands of the late Ottoman Empire, as the Turkish anger over the resolution might induce it to brush aside the US opposition to an unilateral Turkish action in Iraq.

 

On Wednesday, US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs approved a resolution labeling the killings of Armenians between 1915 to 1917 a genocide.

 

The resolution drew the immediate condemnation from the Turkish government, though it would have no binding effect on the US foreign policy.

 

Armenians say more than 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a systematic genocide in the hands of the Ottomans during World War I, before modern Turkey was born in 1923, while Turkey insists the Armenians were victims of widespread chaos and governmental breakdown as the 600-year-old empire collapsed in the years before1923.

 

The PKK has increased its attacks on government troops in southeastern Turkey, which led to rising Turkish demands for an incursion into northern Iraq to crush the rebels based there.

 

The group, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US and the EU, launched an armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in the mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking decades of strife that has claimed more than 30,000 lives.

 

(Xinhua News Agency October 16, 2007)