Kurdish rebels begin withdrawal from Turkey

By Ayla Jean Yackley

SEMDINLI, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkish security forces manned checkpoints along the mountainous border with Iraq on Wednesday, keeping up their guard while Kurdish militants prepared to withdraw after 30 years of conflict that has killed 40,000 and ravaged the region.

Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas accused the army on Tuesday of endangering their agreed pullout with reconnaissance drones and troop movements they said could trigger clashes. But on Wednesday there was no sign of military activity in the grey skies over southeast Turkey.

Soldiers and police mostly waved drivers through four of the checkpoints on the narrow road to the town of Semdinli, where the PKK launched their insurgency with an attack on August 15, 1984, near the borders with Iraq and Iran.

Some of the 2,000 PKK fighters based in Turkey were set to begin trekking through mountains to bases in northern Iraq on Wednesday, taking with them their kalashnikov rifles.

The withdrawal, ordered late last month by top PKK commander Murat Karayilan, is the biggest step yet in a peace deal negotiated by the group's jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan with Turkish officials over recent months.

Some media reports said the withdrawal had begun, but pro-Kurdish MPs monitoring the process and security sources did not confirm that.

"We have observed movement among (PKK) group members, but have not been able to establish whether this is regrouping or preparation for a withdrawal," one security source told Reuters.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has taken a huge gamble with the process, attracting a nationalist backlash before elections next year as he seeks to end a conflict which has put a huge burden on state coffers and tarnished Turkey's image abroad.

Few areas have been scarred by the conflict more than the Semdinli area, accessible by a single road that cuts through emerald-green valleys and snowcapped mountains, and which witnessed the deadliest clashes in more than a decade last year.

"This town has never known normalcy, it has always been in the cross-hairs of war," said 30-year-old Mayor Sedat Tore. He does not remember a time in his life without the violence.

"May 8 represents an enormous opportunity to finally silence the guns. The people don't understand this process fully, but they are hopeful. They are searching for even the smallest ray of light at the end of the tunnel," he said.

RETALIATION WARNING

There was little visible evidence on Wednesday of movement by the fighters, who are accustomed to moving furtively, but they were likely to be closely tracked by security forces with drones and other surveillance equipment.

Pro-Kurdish politicians were in border villages in the mainly Kurdish southeast to monitor the pullout, which was due to take several months. The first fighters were expected to arrive in Iraq within a week.

Erdogan criticized the announcement of a timetable for a PKK withdrawal, reiterating a call for them to disarm before leaving. The PKK rejected this, fearing they could come under attack, as they did in a previous pullback.

"The main issue is to lay down weapons and just withdraw (from Turkey). They surely know the routes from which they have entered Turkey and can use the same routes to leave," Erdogan told reporters on Tuesday.

Karayilan has warned that PKK fighters will retaliate if the Turkish army launches any kind of operation against them.

The rebels are expected to move in groups of around half a dozen in a process expected to take several months, monitored on the Turkish side by the MIT intelligence agency and across the border by the Kurdish regional government of northern Iraq.

Mayor Tore said Semdinli residents were unnerved by the construction in recent months of new military outposts in the area, fearing the state was digging in for a longer war.

Incomes in the area are about half of those in western Turkey but exceed those of neighboring towns due to a thriving business smuggling fuel, household goods and food from Iran and Iraq, Tore said.

Its population has grown fourfold since 1984 to 20,000 people as villagers fled their homes to escape fighting between Turkey and the PKK.

(Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Ralph Boulton)

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Guatemalan trial of ex-dictator Rios Montt to begin

By Mike McDonald

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt is due to go on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity on Tuesday, the first time a country has prosecuted an ex-head of state in a national court on such charges.

For decades, Rios Montt, avoided prosecution for atrocities committed during his 1982-1983 rule in a particularly bloody phase of the country's long civil war, protected as a congressman by a law that grants immunity to public officials.

Rios Montt, 86, who left Congress in 2012, was ordered to trial in January when a judge found sufficient evidence linking him to the killing of more than 1,700 indigenous people in a counter-insurgency plan executed under his command.

"It's historic," Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, told Reuters ahead of the trial. "We cannot leave thousands of deaths unpunished. We must deliver justice to the victims."

A court charged the former ruler in January 2012 for the war crimes, but his defense team had until now stalled the process with a series of appeals, arguing he did not control battlefield operations and that there was no genocide in Guatemala.

Prosecutors allege Rios Montt turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson against leftist insurgents and targeted indigenous people during a "scorched earth" military offensive that killed at least 1,771 members of the Ixil group.

Roughly 200,000 civilians, mostly of Mayan descent, were killed during the 1960-1996 conflict as a string of right-wing governments attempted to rid Guatemala of leftist guerilla fighters suspected of being in alliance with Cold War communists.

An additional 45,000 people went missing.

A United Nations-backed truth commission report released after the 1996 peace accords found that the army and paramilitary groups were responsible for more than 90 percent of the hundreds of massacres carried out during the war.

"This is the first time, anywhere in the world, that a former head of State is being put on trial for genocide by a national tribunal," United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay said in a statement.

"Until quite recently, no one believed a trial like this could possibly take place in Guatemala, and the fact that it is happening there ... should give encouragement to victims of human rights violations all over the world," Pillay added.

MILITARY COUP

Victims and human rights advocates applauded the start of the trial into Rios Montt's 17-month rule.

"Justice has arrived," 51-year-old Ana Ical, whose brother disappeared in 1983, told Reuters. "It's late justice... but we are finally breaking the culture of fear and repression and intimidation that we all had to live through."

Born in Huehuetenango, a province in Guatemala's rural western highlands dotted with indigenous communities, Rios Montt rose to power in March 1982 when he lead a military coup that removed President Angel Guevara from power.

He remained politically active after being overthrown in August 1983, serving in Guatemala's legislature and launching an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2003.

Genocide trials have been rare for ex-leaders in Latin America, a region scarred by bloody civil conflicts and fierce repression. Multiple charges were raised against ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, but he died before standing trial.

Often sporting thick glasses and a gray mustache, Rios Montt has been under house arrest for over a year and the right-wing party that he founded changed its name this year to distance itself from its past.

Rios Montt sat silently through pre-trial hearings, reading Guatemala's constitution and its penal code, occasionally nodding off. He told journalists in January that "whatever I say will be used against me, that's why I'm not talking."

Human Rights groups filed complaint against Rios Montt for genocide in 2001 and prosecutors will present hundreds of testimonies, videos and military documents in the trial against the former dictator, a process that could take months.

A three-judge panel must debate the material and set a date on whether to sentence or exonerate Rios Montt.

(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Dave Graham and Eric Walsh)

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Jurors begin deliberations in New York "cannibal cop" case

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