At least 130 members of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have been killed inside Turkey and in an air raid on rebel hideouts in neighbouring Iraq since violence flared anew in March, the army said Friday, adding it had lost 43 personnel.

The PKK is expected to further intensify and spread its attacks, it warned.

The rebels have in the past bombed civilian targets in western Turkey, including tourist resorts.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan charged the PKK sought to undermine a government initiative to boost Kurdish freedoms and investment in the impoverished southeast in a bid to peacefully end the conflict.

The so-called "Kurdish opening," announced last year, has already faltered amid an opposition outcry that Ankara is bowing to the PKK, as well as persistent rebel attacks and a judicial onslaught on Kurdish activists.

Ankara rejects dialogue with the PKK, which it lists as a terrorist group.

"In spite of terrorism, we will insist on democracy... We are taking all risks... to stop the deaths of youths and the tears of mothers," Erdogan told a meeting of his Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Analysts however played down any prospect of peace at a time when PKK attacks have fuelled public hostility to reform ahead of general elections next year.

"The chance for an opening to silence the guns... no longer exists," columnist Derya Sazak wrote in the Milliyet daily.

"In a Turkey heading to elections, both the ruling party and the opposition are riding the wave of populism and have lost the capacity to produce peaceful solutions," he said.

The Islamist-rooted government is already under pressure after the election of a popular anti-corruption crusader as the head of the main opposition CHP party.

It also faces harsh criticism at home and abroad for its close ties with Iran and a severe crisis with Israel over the latter's deadly raid on Gaza-bound aid ships in which nine Turks were killed.

Adding to the tensions, prosecutors Friday charged 151 Kurds, among them popular politicians, for involvement in an alleged urban wing of the PKK, seeking terms ranging from 15 years to life in jail.

The case was opened in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the southeast, as part of a massive crackdown on Kurdish activists since last year.

In another landmark development, judges Thursday ordered the arrest of several PKK militants who surrendered in October in a gesture of support for Ankara's reform pledges.

In an unusually lenient procedure, the militants were initially allowed to walk free and were greeted with mass pro-PKK demonstrations in the southeast that proved a major embarrassment for Erdogan.

Rusen Cakir, an analyst specialising on the Kurdish issue, said the militants' surrender was organised with government approval, and their arrest signalled that Ankara had now abandoned its perceived if undeclared intention to include the PKK into peace efforts.

"If the state does not keep its promises and continues to leave the problem to the security and judicial authorities, we will wait a lot longer for a solution," he wrote in the Vatan daily.

PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, serving a life sentence since 1999, said through his lawyers last month he was giving up efforts to seek dialogue with the government, leaving PKK commanders in charge of the conflict.

Erdogan's government has made some notable gestures to the Kurds, including the inauguration of a Kurdish-language television channel last year.

The "Kurdish opening" however has failed to produce any concrete results besides the abolition of a ban on speaking Kurdish in prisons.

Ankara meanwhile has moved to mend fences with Iraqi Kurds, long accused of tolerating PKK bases on their soil, and won a pledge this month by their leader Massud Barzani for "all efforts" to curb the rebels.