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Kurdish activists with Swedish citizenship
risk jail in Turkey
31.5.2006
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DIYARBAKIR,
Kurdistan-Turkey, May 31, 2006 (AFP) , -- Two
Kurdish activists with dual Turkish-Swedish
citizenship risk up to three years in jail over a
press statement denouncing the military build-up in
Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, judicial sources
said Wednesday.
A prosecutor in Diyarbakir, the region's biggest
city, accused Ibrahim Guclu and Zeynel Abidin Ozalp
of "spreading propaganda" for the separatist
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in a May 2 press
statement.
A third activist, a Turkish national, was also
charged, the sources said.
The trial is expected to start next week.
Guclu and Ozalp were members of a Kurdish cultural
association the authorities banned in April because
its statutes called for the use of the Kurdish
language in its activities, illegal under Turkish
law.
The statement denounced army operations against the
PKK -- blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara,
the European Union and the United States -- and
claimed that a recent military build-up in the
southeast targeted 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 a
common occurrence.
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 bid for membership in the EU.
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
Southeastern Turkey: North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey)
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