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Kurds stage violent protests in Turkey
15.2.2006
By SELCAN HACAOGLU
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ANKARA, Turkey
Feb 15, 2006 (AP) - Kurdish protesters armed with
firebombs and stones battled with Turkish police
Wednesday to mark the seventh anniversary of
guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan's capture.
Dozens of demonstrators threw rocks and firebombs at
riot police who tried to disperse the demonstrators
in the southeastern town of Cizre in Turkey's mainly
Kurdish southeast. Police fired tear gas and warning
shots in the air to disperse them.
TV footage from the Dogan News Agency showed
demonstrators pelting an armored police car with
rocks. Police detained at least seven protesters in
Cizre, reports said.
The protesters in Cizre were particularly angry over
news that Ocalan's lawyers were not allowed to see
their client on Wednesday.
In other violence elsewhere, Kurdish protesters
smashed the windows of a city bus and clashed with
police in the Mediterranean port city of Mersin.
A small bomb exploded outside a military housing
complex in the southeastern town of Batman. No one
was injured in the blast.
Militants believed to be linked to Ocalan's
autonomy-seeking Kurdistan Workers Party have
claimed responsibility for two bombings in the past
week that killed one person and wounded 30 in
Istanbul, Turkey's largest city.
In Sanliurfa, a city in Turkey's mainly Kurdish
southeast, at least 500 demonstrators marched to
protest Ocalan's imprisonment, chanting slogans in
support of the rebel leader. The demonstrators
unfurled banners of the outlawed group and carried
posters of Ocalan. The group dispersed when riot
police showed up.
Ocalan was captured in Kenya after he was forced to
leave a Greek diplomatic mission there in 1999.
Ocalan was later sentenced to death for leading an
insurgency in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish
southeast that has claimed some 37,000 lives since
1984. His sentence was later commuted to life in
prison, which he is serving out as the sole inmate
on a prison island near Istanbul.
Elsewhere in Turkey's southeast, shopkeepers
shuttered their stores in the cities of Van, Hakkari,
and the town of Dogubayazit in protest Wednesday,
the Anatolia news agency said.
Kurdish protesters also staged sit-ins in the
Mediterranean port city of Mersin and the
southeastern city of Sirnak.
On Tuesday, more than 1,000 Kurds marched in the
streets of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the
southeast. Using Ocalan's nickname, they shouted,
"Long Live Apo!"
Ocalan's rebel group, which the U.S. and European
Union have branded a terrorist organization, has
been fighting Turkish troops for Kurdish autonomy in
the southeast since 1984.
Turkey continues to fight the rebels and does not
recognize the country's sizable Kurdish population
as an official minority.
The fighting in the southeast tapered off after a
rebel truce in 1999. But there has been a resurgence
of violence since June 2004, when the rebels
declared an end to the cease-fire, saying Turkey had
not responded in kind.
AP
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