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Turks, Kurds hold peaceful demos in
Germany
5.11.2007
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November
5, 2007
BERLIN, -- Thousands of Turks and Kurds on
Sunday took to the streets of German cities to
protest mounting tensions between the Turkish army
and Turkey's Kurdish PKK separatists on Turkey's
border with Iraqi Kurdistan autonomous region,
police said.
The protests in Cologne and Berlin went off
peacefully, despite fears of violence following
clashes between Kurds and nationalist Turks in the
German capital last Sunday which left 18 policemen
injured.
In Cologne, thousands of Turks protested against
"terrorist" attacks by the Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK) on Turkish forces.
A few hundred Kurds gathered in Berlin's Neukoelln
district, but were outnumbered by police.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, at the
weekend warned that the country "will not tolerate
violence" between Turks and Kurds on its soil.
Germany is home to about 2.4 million Turks, the
biggest Turkish community outside Turkey, which
includes about 600,000
Kurds.
There are concerns that the immigrant community has
failed to integrate and that its members still
identify strongly with the long-standing conflict
between Turks and Kurdish separatists.
"One can now see where their focus is and what they
identify with -- Turkish identity issues," Buelent
Arslan, the chairman of the German-Turkish forum
within the Christian Democratic Union in North
Rhine-Westphalia, state told a regional newspaper.
Turks and Kurds also held protests in several German
cities on Saturday.
A gathering organised by a Turkish association in
Nuremberg drew 7,000 people while in Hamburg police
seized PKK flags from some 1,850 Kurds who marched
to the Turkish consulate.
Turkey has massed an estimated 100,000 troops along
the Iraqi Kurdistan border and threatened a
large-scale incursion against Turkey's PKK bases in
Iraq since an October 21 ambush in which 12 of its
troops were killed.
Eight soldiers who were seized in the same ambush
were freed on Sunday.
Since 1984 the PKK took up arms for self-rule in the
country's mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey.
Iraqi Kurdish politician says, Turkey is using
Turkey's Kurdish separatist PKK rebel group as an
excuse to invade Kurdistan region 'Iraq' to prevent
the establishment of Kurdistan state in the Kurdish
autonomous region in 'northern Iraq', Ankara fears
this could fan separatism among its own large
Kurdish population in southeast Turkey. www.ekurd.net
AFP
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