Turk PM Pledges Investment, Rights In Kurd. Region

Turkey's prime minister pledged on Saturday to complete a multi-billion dollar investment plan in the impoverished southeast, a move intended to help drain support for the Kurdish PKK guerrilla group.

Tayyip Erdogan, campaigning ahead of the March 29 municipal elections, told thousands of supporters in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir his ruling AK Party would bring jobs and development to a region scarred by unemployment and separatist violence.

"Our country will wake up to a new 'newroz'," Erdogan told a cheering crowd in Diyarbakir, using the word for spring in the once-banned Kurdish language.

Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the Kurdish southeast, is a key election battleground where the AK Party wants to gain fresh legitimacy after it narrowly escaped a legal attempt by its secularist opponents to ban it for Islamist activities in 2008.

A decisive win in the local polls would consolidate its grip on power and give it momentum to pursue its policies, including a plan to reform the military-inspired constitution, key for Ankara's hopes to join the European Union.

Ankara blames the PKK for the deaths of 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, since the group began its armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey in 1984.

Ahead of the vote, the AK Party has boosted local spending and has given out white goods to the poor in the southeast, drawing the ire of opposition parties who say the government is using state money to win elections.

There are fears Turkey's economy could slip into recession due to the global economic crisis, but Erdogan said the massive investment programme will be completed by 2012.

First announced in 2008 for 14.55 billion lira ($8.6 billion), it includes improving infrastructure and irrigation in the region.

Erdogan, whose AK Party is locked in a fight for votes in Diyarbakir with the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), has been courting the support of Turkey's 12 million Kurds who have long been discriminated against by the state.

He was the first Turkish public figure to acknowledge in a landmark speech several years that Turkey had a "Kurdish problem", winning him votes from local pro-Kurdish parties.

In January, Turkey launched a Kurdish language channel on state television, a move among cultural reforms inspired by Ankara's bid to join the EU.

Erdogan's speech, which was broadcast live on Kurdish state television, was well received by Kurds, weary of violence.

"I felt like I was somewhere else because what he said about Diyarbakir's future," said Huseyin Beden, 43, a shopkeeper.

"We do not want violence anymore. We want stability, Diyarbakir deserves good things."