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Turkish Police Arrest 50 in Pro-Kurdish Demo in Istanbul
ISTANBUL, August 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Turkish police detained 50 people, most of them women, on Sunday as they attempted to hold a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Istanbul, Anatolia news agency reported.
The detainees were among over 100 members of "The Mothers' Initiative for Peace", a pro-Kurdish women's group, who had gathered in the Beyoglu district of the European quarter in Istanbul, the report said, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Riot police made the arrests as a spokesman for the group began to read a statement to the press, the agency said, without giving details.
The Beyoglu district is frequently the scene of pro-Kurdish demonstrations against conditions in Turkish jails.
A 10-month hunger strike by prisoners and relatives against jail conditions has claimed 31 lives, AFP reported.
In an earlier crackdown on pro-Kurds, a senior official of Turkey's pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HADEP) was jailed for 39 days for reportedly disseminating "separatist propaganda", his lawyer said.
The conviction of HADEP deputy chairman, Ahmet Turan Demir, stemmed from remarks he made at a party function in October 1999 in which he likened a prospective settlement of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, lawyer Mehmet Nuri Ozmen told AFP.
He was alleged to have said, "They resolved their problems like this, I mean they split up without a quarrel. The problem here must be resolved in this or any other way."
Demir was originally sentenced to one year in jail. But his term was commuted to 39 days after the court took into account the time he had spent in detention in connection with other cases for which he was acquitted, Ozmen said.
Demir escaped another jail term of 45 monthsor allegedly aiding and abetting Kurdish rebels, thanks to an amnesty law of last December.
HADEP members are frequently persecuted for alleged ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a 15-year war for self-rule in southeast Turkey with the conflict claiming some 36,500 lives.
HADEP itself risks being banned in a case still to come before the courts in which it is accused of alleged association with the PKK.
But the party, which campaigns for Kurdish cultural freedoms, has denied the charges.
Meanwhile, the outlawed PKK has warned that its rebels would re-launch their armed campaign against Turkey if Ankara failed to address the grievances of its large Kurdish community.
"We do not want war. (But) if the process (to resolve the dispute) runs into a bottleneck, we will try every means, including using arms," warned senior PKK commander, Murat Karayilan, AFP reported.
He was speaking during a debate program broadcast live on the pro-Kurdish satellite television channel, Medya-TV, to mark the 17th anniversary of the launch of PKK's armed campaign for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.
Karayilan accused Turkey of ignoring Kurdish demands for greater cultural rights and continuing to pursue a campaign to annihilate the PKK, blocking any prospect of dialogue to resolve the dispute.
He warned that PKK activists would retaliate in self-defense if Turkish security forces continued to hunt them down.
"If we take up our weapons and restart the war, it would not be like the previous one, but more intense and destructive," he said.
Karayilan urged Turkey's Kurdish community to demonstrate in protest at Ankara's rejection of dialogue to settle the long-running conflict.
The strictly secular Turkish government has failed to introduce broadcasting and teaching in Kurdish despite increasing European Union pressure on Turkey, which is seeking to join the 15-nation E.U.
The PKK took up arms against Ankara on August 15, 1984, starting 15 years of clashes that have killed more than 36,000 people, most of them Kurdish fighters.
In September 1999, the group said it would stop fighting Ankara and withdraw from Turkish territory to seek a peaceful resolution to Kurdish grievances.
The statement followed a peace appeal from PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who is on death row in a Turkish jail.
Since then, fighting has subsided and several thousand rebels have moved to the north of neighboring Iraq.
But, the powerful Turkish military has played down the peace bid as a ploy, calling on the rebels to unconditionally surrender or face army guns.
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