DIYARBAKIR, (Northern Kurdistan), AFP- 24
February 2007 — A senior Kurdish politician was arrested here yesterday over
remarks that allegedly threatened violence in Turkey, following the arrest of
two other Kurdish activists overnight, officials said. All three men are members
of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), the main political movement of Turkey’s
Kurdish minority.
A court in Diyarbakir, the central city of the
predominantly Kurdish southeast, charged DTP provincial chairman Hilmi Aydogdu
with “inciting hatred” and jailed him pending trial, judicial officials said.
In the eastern city of Van, DTP provincial
chairman Ibrahim Sunkur and another party activist, Abdulvahap Turan, were
arrested late Thursday for allegedly supporting separatist Kurdish rebels
fighting the Ankara government, Anatolia news agency reported.
The authorities acted after documents and
banners of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as well as banned books
by its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan were seized in the city’s DTP office.
Aydogdu, meanwhile, was arrested after the
media quoted him as saying this week that Turkey’s Kurds would “consider a
Turkish attack on Kirkuk as an attack on Diyarbakir.”
Ankara has issued harsh warnings over the
future of the ethnically mixed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq
(Southern Kurdistan), which the Kurds want to incorporate into their autonomous
region.
Aydogdu’s remarks provoked a harsh reaction
here at a time when Iraqi Kurds are accused of supporting the PKK, whose
militants have long taken refuge in the mountains of the Kurdish autonomous
region of Kurdistan.
The Turkish Army chief said last week that
Iraqi Kurds provided the PKK with explosives for bomb attacks across the border
in Turkey.
In another case, dozens of mayors belonging to
the Democratic Society Party are being tried on charges that they were helping
terrorists by arguing to keep a Kurdish TV station on the air in Denmark.
Nearly 60 mayors had signed a letter to Danish
Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen asking him not to pull the plug on the
Denmark-based Roj TV station, despite claims by Turkey that it is a PKK
propaganda machine.
