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Kurdish activists with Swedish citizenship
arrested in Turkey
4.5.2006
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DIYARBAKIR,
Kurdistan-Turkey, May 4, 2006 (AFP) - Two
alleged Kurdish activists with dual Turkish-Swedish
citizenship have been arrested here on charges of
spreading propaganda for separatist Kurdish rebels,
judicial officials said Thursday.
A court in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkey's
mainly Kurdish southeast, ordered the arrests
Wednesday of Ibrahim Guclu and Zeynel Abidin Ozalp
on charges that a press statement they made earlier
in the week amounted to propaganda for the
separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
A third person was also arrested.
The Swedish embassy was not immeditely available for
comment.
Guclu and Ozalp were members of a Kurdish cultural
association the authorities banned last month on
grounds that a provision in its statute calling for
the use of the Kurdish language in its activities
was unlawful.
The statement they made to the press Tuesday
denounced army operations against the PKK,
blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara, the
European Union and the United States, and claimed
that the target of a recent military build-up in the
southeast was the "entire Kurdish people."
Many Kurdish dissidents were granted political
asylum in European countries in the 1990s, when the
prosecution of activists and intellectuals opposed
to the official stance on the Kurdish question was
commonplace.
Some have returned to Turkey over the past few years
after Ankara undertook a series of reforms to expand
Kurdish cultural freedoms as part of efforts to
boost its EU membership bid.
The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed more than
37,000 lives since the PKK took up arms for Kurdish
self-rule in the southeast in 1984.
AFP
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