ISTANBUL // Up to 100,000 Kurds are expected to rally today to honour the three activists killed in Paris but the Turkish government is concerned the event may turn into a show of strength by radicals bent on derailing peace talks.
The three women, Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, were shot dead by unknown attackers on January 9 and were close to the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has accused Ankara of being behind the killings.
The PKK has fought a war against the Turkish government for nearly three decades but negotiations are under way to try to end the conflict.
"There is an intention to put dynamite to this peace process that we have started," the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told legislators of his ruling Justice and Development Party.
The prime minister said he hoped the rally in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkey's Kurdish region in south-east Anatolia, and funerals would pass off without any "provocations".
Duran Kalkan, a PKK commander seen as a hardliner, said the Paris killings served as a warning to Kurds of what to expect from Turkey if the rebels laid down their arms, which is the government's main aim in current peace talks.
The killings were "part of a planned destruction and liquidation attack" against Kurds, Kalkan said this week, according to the ANF news agency, a PKK mouthpiece.
Ankara has rejected the accusation and said the killings appeared to have been part of a bloody feud within the PKK.
Ahmet Turk, a prominent Kurdish politician involved in the peace talks, said Iran may have been behind the killings, the Haberturk newspaper reported yesterday.
The bodies of the women were to arrive in Turkey last night. They will be buried in their respective hometowns tomorrow.
A spokeswoman in Diyarbakir for the Party for Peace and Democracy (BDP), Turkey's biggest Kurdish party, said her organisation expected about 100,000 people at the rally scheduled at noon today.
The rally comes at a critical time for both sides.
Last month, the government started peace talks with the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and the talks are expected to continue this month.
In a sign of goodwill, Turkish authorities last week installed a television in Ocalan's cell for the first time since the PKK leader was brought to the prison island of Imrali near Istanbul almost 14 years ago.
Before, he was only allowed to listen to radio programmes from the Turkish state broadcaster TRT.
Mr Erdogan and Kurdish politicians say they are determined to push ahead with the negotiations despite the Paris killings. But Mr Erdogan also warned that the Diyarbakir rally could be exploited by radical Kurds opposed to a peace deal.
Sirri Sakik, a prominent BDP legislator, said this week that "dark forces" were out to undermine the peace process.
Pointing to the process for ending armed conflict in Northern Ireland, Mr Sakik said that both sides should not let themselves be discouraged by efforts to derail peace talks.
"We must not be afraid," he said.
Meanwhile, military sources said yesterday that Turkish jets had struck more than 50 PKK targets in northern Iraq late on Tuesday.
tseibert@thenational.ae
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Start-up hopes to end Japan's love affair with cash
Across most of Asia, people pay for taxi rides, restaurant meals and merchandise with smartphone-readable barcodes — except in Japan, where cash still rules. Now, as the country’s biggest web companies race to dominate the payments market, one Tokyo-based startup says it has a fighting chance to win with its QR app.
Origami had a head start when it introduced a QR-code payment service in late 2015 and has since signed up fast-food chain KFC, Tokyo’s largest cab company Nihon Kotsu and convenience store operator Lawson. The company raised $66 million in September to expand nationwide and plans to more than double its staff of about 100 employees, says founder Yoshiki Yasui.
Origami is betting that stores, which until now relied on direct mail and email newsletters, will pay for the ability to reach customers on their smartphones. For example, a hair salon using Origami’s payment app would be able to send a message to past customers with a coupon for their next haircut.
Quick Response codes, the dotted squares that can be read by smartphone cameras, were invented in the 1990s by a unit of Toyota Motor to track automotive parts. But when the Japanese pioneered digital payments almost two decades ago with contactless cards for train fares, they chose the so-called near-field communications technology. The high cost of rolling out NFC payments, convenient ATMs and a culture where lost wallets are often returned have all been cited as reasons why cash remains king in the archipelago. In China, however, QR codes dominate.
Cashless payments, which includes credit cards, accounted for just 20 per cent of total consumer spending in Japan during 2016, compared with 60 per cent in China and 89 per cent in South Korea, according to a report by the Bank of Japan.
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Founder: Hussam Hammo
Based: Amman, Jordan
Employees: 55
Funding: $6m
Funders: Wamda Capital, Modern Electronics (part of Al Falaisah Group) and North Base Media
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