ISTANBUL, Jan 29 (AFP) - Seven pro-Kurdish activists were charged Tuesday with involvement in an illegal demonstration and "displaying slogans in the Kurdish language", sources from the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HADEP) told AFP.
Turkish police on Friday detained 128 HADEP members, following protests in several cities in the mainly Kurdish southeast over the disappearance of two HADEP members last year.

Among the seven men charged in the southeastern city of Tarsus Tuesday, are Abdullah Olmez, head of the local regional council, Haci Artes, an elected municipal official, and five other members of the pro-Kurd party, Yusuf Cetinel, the local party president told AFP.

All other demonstrators taken in for questioning in Tarsus had been released Sunday, Cetinel added.

Two HADEP activists, Serdar Tanis and Ebubekir Deniz, were detained last year in the southeast town of Silopi following a summons to appear at a paramilitary police station.

There has been no word of the two men since then despite separate investigations launched by the government and local authorities.

Tuesday's arrests follow the closure the previous day by Turkish authorities of the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul, a privately-funded establishment which publishes documents and runs courses in the Kurdish language.

A HADEP statement regretted the closure which it termed "anti-democratic" and called for its immediate re-opening.

The institute's director Hasan Kaya said the decision to close the building had been by direct order from the capital's governor and that he had received no official notification of the ruling.

Last month, charges against Kaya that he was acting in violation of a Turkish law banning the private teaching of the Kurdish language were thrown out.

Turkish authorities frequently clamp down on HADEP, detaining or jailing its members on suspicion of links to armed rebels who waged a 15-year armed campaign against Ankara for Kurdish self-rule in southeast Turkey.

HADEP, which campaigns for a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question, denies the charges, but nonetheless faces a possible ban for alleged association with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Turkey's normally tense southeast has been relatively calm since September 1999, when the PKK abandoned its armed campaign in favour of seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict following peace calls from its jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan.