Homeland Security

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QUESTION: Back to Turkey. I believe today these financial sanctions against the Kurdish group were announced or published in the Federal Register. Can you tell us more about that?

MR. BOUCHER: The extension, or the modification, I guess, to that provision was based on the group's attempts to modify its name. The Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Treasury and the Attorney General, determined that the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, has changed its name to the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress, that the relevant circumstances for designating this group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and under the Terrorist Financing Executive Order still exist. The group also uses the names Freedom and Democracy Congress of Kurdistan and KADEK, K-A-D-E-K.

Despite claims by senior party officials that they would regroup as a new politically oriented organization, the organization continues to operate under the same leadership and with the same aim of committing acts of terrorism that threaten US interests and security of US nationals. The United States will continue to monitor designated groups so that they can't evade legal sanctions by changing their names. That's what happened.

QUESTION: Same subject. Does that -- do those aliases also apply to the FTO list? Will they be added to the FTO list, the aliases?

MR. BOUCHER: Yeah, it'll be --

QUESTION: Because it didn't actually say that.

MR. BOUCHER: It didn't actually say that?

QUESTION: No, as far as I can work out.

MR. BOUCHER: I'll have to double-check, but I think certainly with regard to all the regulations involved they would be listed under multiple names.

QUESTION: And secondly, is this something that the Turkish Government requested?

MR. BOUCHER: Don't know. It's something we do as a matter of course, frankly, when we see these kind of changes by groups so that they -- as I said, so that people can't evade the sanctions just by changing a name.