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Four reported dead in fresh Kurdish riots
in Turkey
3.4.2006
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ISTANBUL, April
3, 2006 (AFP) - A molotov cocktail attack set
ablaze a bus in Istanbul late Sunday, resulting in
three deaths, as Kurdish riots rattling southeast
Turkey for six days spead to the west, the CNN Turk
news channel reported.
Another person was killed in clashes in the
predominantly Kurdish southeast, bringing the death
toll from a week of violence to 12.
A group of protestors hurled a molotov cocktail onto
a bus in Istanbul's Bagcilar suburb and an elderly
woman who got off in panic from the burning vehicle
was hit by a car in the street, dying in hospital,
CNN Turk said.
Two more bodies were recovered after police removed
the wreckage of the bus, which crashed into a truck
while maneuvering to escape the hit, it said.
Another woman passenger was seriously injured.
Television footage showed firefighters battling the
flames engulfing the bus, which was reduced to a
blackened skeleton.
Police officials contacted by AFP declined to
comment.
A group of angry residents who gathered at the site
chanted slogans against Kurdish separatism, NTV
television reported.
A fourth person, a 22-year-old Kurdish man, was
killed by gunfire in the southeastern town of
Kiziltepe, near the Syrian border, where street
battles between rioters and the police flared for a
second day in row, a senior local Kurdish
politician, Ferhan Turk, told AFP.
Three others were injured, he said. Officials were
not immediately available for comment.
An angry crowd torched a bank and vandalized public
buildings, party offices and shops in Kiziltepe
Saturday, prompting the security forces to fire
warning shots and use tear gas, killing one person.
Also in Istanbul, home to a sizeable Kurdish
immigrant community, about 200 protestors, some of
them wearing masks, took to the streets in the city
center earlier Sunday, setting fire to a truck and
hurling Molotov cocktails, stones and bottles at the
riot police, who responded with truncheons and
pepper gas.
Several protestors, running from the police, were
attacked by a group of residents in a mainly Roma
neighborhood wielding knives and sticks and shouting
nationalist slogans.
At least seven demonstrators were detained, the
Anatolia news agency said.
Ahmet Turk, the co-chairman of Turkey's main Kurdish
party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), urged an
end to the violence and called on Ankara to come up
with far-reaching reforms to make permanent peace
with its largest minority.
The riots erupted Tuesday in Diyarbakir, the largest
city in the mainly Kurdish southeast, after hundreds
of youths demanding vengeance attacked the police
following the funerals of Kurdish rebels killed in
fighting with the army.
Three of the victims of the violence were children,
one aged only three, and most of the injured were
security forces.
Officials charged that the unrest was orchestrated
by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),
which has waged an armed separatist campaign against
the government since 1984, with the conflict
claiming some 37,000 lives.
Ahmet Turk described the riots as the explosion of
entangled political, social and economic problems
that have plagued the southeast, Turkey's poorest
region, for decades.
He called for a comprehensive government program
that would include the improvement of Kurdish
cultural and political rights, economic and social
development and a general amnesty for the PKK.
"How can you resolve the problem only with the
stick, with repression and silencing? We want this
mentality to change," he told CNN-Turk. "The
(Kurdish) people believe they are still regarded as
a kind of quasi-citizens."
The southeast had enjoyed relative calm in recent
years after the PKK declared a unilateral truce in
1999 and Ankara, under European Union pressure,
granted the Kurds a measure of cultural rights,
lifted emergency rule in the region and began
compensating villagers who had suffered in the
conflict.
Tensions have been on the rise, however, since June
2004, when the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group
by Turkey, the EU and the United States, called off
the five-year ceasefire.
Compared to much more hardline practices in the
past, the response of the security forces was more
restrained this time, apparently to avoid damage to
relations with the EU.
AFP
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