KurdistanObserver.com

Kurdish Main party In Northern Kurdistan Accuses Turkish Regime Over Deadly Rioting

April 3, 2006  AFP, Reuter, AP

Turkey's main Kurdish party lashed out at the government on Monday over the use of excessive force in response to a week of violence between Kurdish protestors and police that has claimed 15 lives.

"We condemn all protests that fall outside democratic limits, but in a state based on the rule of law, no weapons can be used against an unarmed protest," Aysel Tugluk, the co-chairman of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), told a press conference here.

"It is the government and the prime minister who are responsible for all that has happened," she added.

The rioting began last Tuesday in Diyarbakir, the biggest city of the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country after the funerals of separatist Kurdish rebels killed in fighting with the army, before spreading to the region.

Riot police used firearms to disperse the protestors as angry youths torched government buildings and banks, vandalized shops and attacked the police with petrol bombs and stones.

Among the 15 victims were three children, one of whom was shot while watching the rioting from the balcony of his home, Tugluk said.

"Children who had no part in the incidents and who were watching the events from the balcony or the park were massacred," she said.

Tugluk expressed concern that the clashes could deteriorate into ethnic fighting and called on the government to drop its "policy of violence" and focus on democratic reforms that would allow it to make peace with the Kurdish minority.

"Through this policy, the government is shutting off dialogue and peace and dragging Turkey into darkness with its anti-terror law and anti-democratic measures," she charged.

"There is no option other than a political and democratic solution."

Ayhan Karabulut, a local DTP leader in Batman, east of Diyarbakir, was detained on Monday for speeches made during the unrest, Anatolia news agency reported.

The situation was calm on Monday in Diyarbakir but the spread of unrest to Istanbul, home to hundreds of thousands of often poor Kurdish immigrants, raised the spectre of ethnic violence.

"The use by some anti-government parties of ethnic divisions as a political instrument could degenerate into violence," warned Jean-François Perouse, a researcher with a French sociological institute based in Istanbul.

He was referring to nationalist opposition parties that strongly reject any political solution to Turkey's Kurdish problem, preferring military action to what they consider a security issue.

Perouse added that Istanbul's Kurdish community -- the result of "forced immigration" sparked by fighting between the army and the PKK in southeast Turkey in the 1990s -- was particularly violence prone because "it has been economically and politically marginalised".

An armed Kurdish rebel group that has claimed several deadly bomb attacks in Turkey in the past threatened Monday to hit tourist targets across the country.

In a statement posted on the website of the Europe-based pro-Kurdish Firat news agency, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) called on foreign tourists to avoid Turkey "or face the consequences."

"Foreign currency brought in by tourists is the greatest resource of the Turkish state ... in its attacks against the Kurdish people," the TAK statement said.

"We declare that we will target hotels, amusement areas and tourism companies," TAK said.

In Istanbul's Gazi district, which has a sizeable Kurdish population, police also fired tear gas to break up a 150-strong group of stone-throwing youths who had set up barricades and set fire to rubbish containers, CNN Turk reported.