3 Turkish Aides Slain; Kurdish Rebels Blamed

Serving a grim warning that the Kurds are not just a refugee problem, Kurdish guerrillas have killed three officials in southeastern Turkey in what the interior minister Monday called a new attempt to drive out Turkish rule there.

Two men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles burst into a clubhouse in the small town of Solhan on Sunday and began firing around the room, filled with people playing cards and dominoes.

Solhan’s top civilian administrator, the state prosecutor and the chief of forestry were killed. Two judges and the local police chief were badly wounded, as were five others in the club.

Although there was no claim of responsibility, Turkish Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu blamed the rebel Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, a Marxist group. “It’s an attempt to make their voice heard,” Aksu told reporters.

A spate of PKK attacks has hit southeastern Turkey, home to nearly half of Turkey’s 12 million Kurds, in parallel with the increase in Western relief efforts for the nearly half a million Iraqi Kurds who are stranded on the Iraqi-Turkish frontier after the failure of their rebellion against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The Kurdish separatists in Turkey have been waging a violent spring offensive against the Ankara government, sometimes from bases in northern Iraq, in a campaign that has left more than 3,000 dead since 1984. Although based there, the Turkish separatist Kurds have not taken part in the Iraqi Kurds’ revolt against Hussein.

The presence of PKK guerrillas in northern Iraq is sure to complicate the efforts of U.S. and other military contingents trying to set up camps for the refugees, protect them from Iraqi forces and, eventually, hand over the whole operation to the United Nations.

The network of havens set up by the allies in northern Iraq is steadily expanding eastward, with the enthusiastic support of the Turkish government, which--with its own large and restive Kurdish population--has largely closed its borders to the refugees.

A senior Turkish official in Diyarbakir, the capital of southeastern Turkey, said Ankara’s enthusiasm for the project is not entirely selfless. Allied troops, he hinted, may be forced to deal with the northern Iraqi mountain strongholds of the PKK, a hardened guerrilla force whose ideology is Marxist and anti-American.

In other developments:

* Allied officers met with a dozen Iraqi Kurdish guerrilla leaders in the town of Zakhu and ordered them to stop blocking roads to refugees who want to trek down from their mountain encampments to the tent cities built by the allies to house them.

* U.N. officials are expected to be in Zakhu today to begin the transition to U.N. responsibility for the operation of the first refugee camp established in northern Iraq by U.S. military forces.

* In southern Iraq, Kuwaiti soldiers fired into the air to control desperate Iraqi refugees scuffling to get into the last buses heading for Kuwait city for flights to Iran. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force operated eight airlifts, each carrying some 100 refugees, out of the area and to a new camp being built at Rafha, Saudi Arabia. Iran has said it would accept 1,900 people with some Iranian links from the Kuwaiti-run Abdali camp and an adjacent refugee camp run by the U.S. Army. The Saudi and Iranian sanctuary offers should help pave the way for a U.S. troop withdrawal from southern Iraq.

* President Bush said he opposes Iraq’s request to the United Nations that it be allowed to sell a limited amount of oil in order to raise money to deal with its humanitarian needs.

* The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iraq has submitted a letter detailing the location of its nuclear material. An IAEA spokesman in Vienna called the letter “very detailed” but would not say if it met the disclosure terms set by the United Nations.

* State Department officials said Iraq expects to restore a diplomatic presence in Washington by opening an interests section shortly. Iraq’s embassy was closed on Feb. 6, when Baghdad broke relations with the United States. An interests sections is a lower-level diplomatic mission that operates in another country’s embassy, and Algeria is believed to have agreed to sponsor the Iraqis.

The Roadblocks

Some of the Kurdish guerrillas have blocked the refugees’ return out of fear for their safety. Others have used the opportunity to charge tolls.

Col. Jim Jones, the highest-ranking U.S. Marine Corps officer in northern Iraq, said U.S. patrols have been sent to some of the more notorious checkpoints “to tell them to knock that stuff off,” the Associated Press reported from Zakhu.

“It’s immoral, and it’s got to stop,” said Jones. “They’re straight-out bandits.”

Military officials said some Kurdish guerrillas had been refusing to allow refugees to go to the camp at Zakhu because they were not convinced it was safe from Iraqi attack.

U.S., French, Dutch and British officials met Monday with about a dozen Iraqi Kurdish rebel leaders to tell them to stop preventing the refugees from returning home.

After allied officers met with the guerrilla leaders Monday in Zakhu, the senior rebel chieftain, who identified himself only as General Ali, was taken to one checkpoint by a U.S. helicopter. He told his men to let Kurdish refugees pass by.

The officers said allied forces told Kurdish guerrillas they will not tolerate violence either in the camps or in cities within the allied security zone in northern Iraq.

Allied Aid

United Nations and allied spokesmen on the Iraqi-Turkish frontier said the first convoy of U.N. humanitarian aid will enter Zakhu from Turkey today and a second convoy will arrive soon afterward from Baghdad.

“This is to establish their (the United Nations’) presence and start the process of assuming control,” said Col. Don Kirchoffner, a spokesman for U.S. forces aiding the refugees.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: “With the establishment of reliable delivery systems for relief supplies and medical assistance, camp conditions are improving, though much remains to be done.

“Things are looking up,” he added.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney quipped that the food situation has improved so much that “the Iraqi refugees are now rejecting MREs,” the military’s packaged “Meals, Ready to Eat.”

Later, the Pentagon said in a statement: “Some refugees, in some cases, are choosing bulk food over MREs, which suggests that they have confidence in the system and are not as desperate as they once were.”

In Baghdad, a U.N. spokesman said that Kurdish refugees who fled Iraq for their lives were returning home at the rate of almost 20,000 a day but a lack of cash could affect the world body’s ability to respond.

Bernd Bernander, coordinator of a U.N. relief operation in Iraq, said that the United Nations would be studying the costs and logistics involved in taking over camps in havens set up by U.S., British, French and other Western troops.

“We were very impressed with the significant number of people who were returning in the Sulaymaniyah and Irbil regions,” Bernander told a news conference, according to Reuters.

Turkey’s President Turgut Ozal, meanwhile, urged the allies not to quit the region. “If the allied powers do not maintain their presence in northern Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds will start running again as soon as they see an Iraqi soldier,” Ozal said in an interview published by Turkey’s Anatolian news agency and the Iranian news agency.

Ozal spoke just before a visit to Turkey by Iranian leader Hashemi Rafsanjani in which he said the main subject would be how to deal with the Iraqi Kurdish refugees, more than 1 million of whom have also gone to Iran.

Iraq and Oil

President Bush, opposing Iraq’s request to be allowed to sell oil, told reporters at the White House: “There’s not going to be any relief as far as the United States goes, until they move forward on a lot of fronts.

“We’re not going to have normalized relations with this man,” he again said of President Hussein.

The U.N. Security Council is expected to begin debate today on an Iraqi request to export $942.5 million worth of oil so that it can buy foodstuffs and other emergency supplies.

“The restoration of food support for Iraq is under way, the United States having taken some steps,” Bush said, according to Reuters. “We are not going to let people starve.

“But in terms of building reliable markets, and in terms of trying to have normalized trade, the United States will not have normalized trade as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

Times staff writers Don Shannon and James Gerstenzang, in Washington, contributed to this story.