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ANKARA, Sept 5 (AFP) - 22h40 - Nearly 200 people
were injured in unrest across Turkey when
sympathizers of jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah
Ocalan clashed with Turkish nationalists and the
police following the banning of a pro-Ocalan
demonstration at the weekend, officials said.
The tensions erupted late Sunday in Bozuyuk, in the
northwestern Bilecik province, when locals attacked
buses carrying Kurdish activists travelling through
the town after being prevented from holding a rally
in nearby Gemlik against Ocalan's prison conditions.
Bilecik Governor Musa Colak said that 144 people
were injured in the street clashes, which saw
townsmen hit and break the windows of the buses as
police used truncheons to keep them back.
The Bozuyuk residents, Colak said, were provoked by
Kurdish activists who were waving flags made of the
Kurdish colours of yellow, red and green, and were
holding up posters of Ocalan, the head of the
outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has
fought a bloody separatist war on Ankara since 1984.
He charged that some of the Kurdish demonstrators
had also broken shop windows with sticks and stones,
angering residents.
Police and paramilitary gendarme reinforcements were
called in to placate the angry mob.
Seventeen police officers, seven soldiers and a
doctor were among the injured, Colak said.
Four of the injured were in a serious condition, NTV
television reported.
The Kurdish activists were among an estimated 2,000
people who had travelled mainly from the southeast
for a planned rally in Gemlik, which the authorities
banned on the grounds that it was masterminded by
Ocalan's PKK, considered a terrorist group by Ankara
as well as the United States and the European Union.
Gemlik is a small port town on the coast of the
Marmara Sea, which lies across from the prison
island of Imrali, where Ocalan is the sole inmate.
The unrest triggered more violence Monday in
Diyarbakir, the main city of the predominantly
Kurdish southeast, where some 1,000 people staged a
march, brandishing Ocalan portraits and shouting
slogans in favour of the rebel chieftain.
The march turned ugly when the protestors pelted the
police with stones and firebombs and vandalized
shops, prompting the security forces to respond with
tear gas and high pressure hoses.
About 25 people were injured and some 20 others
detained, local officials said.
In Van, to the northeast, 10 people, among them
three policemen, were injured, and 80 protestors
detained when a crowd of Kurdish activists clashed
with the security forces, local governor Niyazi
Tanilir told the Anatolia news agency.
The demonstrators hurled stones and incendiary
devices at the police, who fired warning shots into
the air and used tear gas.
Ocalan has been in solitary confinement in Imrali
island since being sentenced to death in 1999 for
treason. His sentence was later commuted to life
imprisonment.
Kurdish activists and the PKK have urged Ankara to
move Ocalan to an ordinary jail on the grounds that
solitary confinement is inhumane and conditions on
the island are affecting Ocalan's health.
Improving Ocalan's prison conditions was one of the
demands made by the PKK's political wing, KONGRA-GEL,
when it announced a one-month unilateral cease-fire
until September 20 to give Ankara time to improve
Kurdish freedoms.
The truce has been brushed aside by the Turkish
army.
Some 37,000 people have been killed since 1984 when
the rebels first took up arms for Kurdish self-rule
in the southeast.
AFP
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