KurdistanObserver.com
Turkey Arrests Nine For Calling Kurdish Freedom Fighters
‘Martyrs’
deepikaglobal.com
September 10, 2007
DIYARBAKIR,(Northern Kurdistan): Turkish authorities have
arrested nine members of a pro-Kurdish political party for referring to Kurdish
separatist rebels as “martyrs”, security sources said on Sunday. The nine are
members of the Democratic Society Party (DTP),which campaigns for more political
and cultural rights for Turkey’s large ethnic Kurdish minority. The DTP won 20
seats in Turkey’s parliament in July general elections.
If convicted, they could face several years in jail under Turkey’s penal code
for praising and supporting terrorism.
Ankara blames rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) for the
deaths of more than 30,000 people since it launched its armed struggle for an
ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey in 1984.
Turkey routinely uses the word “martyr” to describe soldiers and other security
personnel killed in clashes with the PKK.
The nine men came from provinces in the southeast, said the security sources in
Diyarbakir, the region’s biggest city.
In a further sign of continued tensions between Ankara and the country’s Kurds,
DTP lawmaker Sabahat Tuncel rejected on Sunday an appeal from Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan that her party condemn the PKK as a terrorist
organisation. “Nobody should expect us to call our children terrorists,” she
told a gathering in the south-eastern town of Batman.
“We want to live in these lands keeping our own differences. This is the first
time the Kurds are represented to this degree (in parliament). The ruling party
must assess properly this chance,” Tuncel said in televised remarks.
Many Turks regard the DTP as a mouthpiece for the PKK rebels. The DTP insists it
wants a peaceful, political resolution of the Kurdish issue.
