Turkey Moving to Quell Kurdish Rebels : Uprising: Internal exile, severe press censorship and doubled jail terms are included in decree.

An alarmed Turkish government imposed Draconian emergency measures Tuesday to quell a violent rebellion by minority Kurds in southeastern Turkey that is beginning to resemble the Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Internal exile, severe press censorship and the doubling of jail sentences for Kurds aiding “separatist terrorists” are among the 13 points of a decree issued after a seven-hour Cabinet meeting in Ankara presided over by President Turgut Ozal.

Left-wing opposition political parties immediately attacked the decree as anti-democratic. A proviso authorizing regional governors to close publications that “disturb the public order, excite the people, or obstruct security forces” stunned the Turkish press.

“This is the harshest decree that I can imagine. It shows they will act in a very radical way,” said Oktay Eksi, president of the Press Council, a watchdog for freedom of expression in Turkey.

Said the editor of a major newspaper: “This is very vague and very severe. We are at their mercy. But don’t quote me by name: I don’t need any more trouble.”

Ozal has vowed a “merciless struggle” against separatist rebels of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), who have been waging a guerrilla war since 1984 in southeastern provinces where most of Turkey’s 8 million Kurds are concentrated.

Last weekend, Turkish army troops reported killing 21 guerrillas in a two-day battle near the Iraqi border that marked the heaviest guerrilla casualties in any single action of the sporadic war.

Turkish officials say privately that Syria helps to arm and train the Marxist rebels, whose main camps are in Syrian-controlled Lebanon and who infiltrate Turkey through Iraq. Syria and Iraq deny backing the guerrillas.

About 2,100 civilians, guerrillas and soldiers have died in the war, 86 of them this year, in eight Kurdish-speaking provinces where Tuesday’s decree extended emergency rule that has been in effect since 1987. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that five of the fatalities came in an attack by Kurdish guerrillas overnight near the village of Catak.

Despite tight government control of the region, journalists there report unprecedented civilian support in recent months for the aims, if not the methods, of rebels once derided as outlaws by fellow Kurds.

The guerrillas routinely kill women and children relatives of pro-government militiamen, attempting to force residents to take sides. They have killed 40 schoolteachers, one of them in March, when they also killed nine Turkish managers of a mining company.

Lately, though, there have been protest marches, strikes, stone-throwing, tire-burning and the shuttering of shops to support the guerrillas in Kurdish towns and in the regional capital, Diyarbakir.

The government decree bans strikes, lockouts and shop closures of the sort that have become a staple of Palestinians protesting against Israeli control.

Turkish analysts speculated that the government might use internal exile provisions of the decree to relocate Kurds from areas along the border with Syria and Iraq to complicate guerrilla transportation and communication. By one report, more than 400 villages in the disputed zone have already been abandoned, either by voluntary flight of their frightened residents or government pressure.

Ozal, who was elected president in November after six years as prime minister but retains governmental control, has promised “compassion” for residents of the economically backward southeast as the flip side of his anti-guerrilla campaign.

Carrots accompanying the stick in Tuesday’s decree included promises of 90,000 government jobs and sharp salary increases for government workers, particularly teachers, whose flight has caused closure of about 400 schools.