KurdistanObserver.com

Festive Kurds Want Freedom For Rebel Chief Ocalan
By Gareth Jones
March 21, 2006

DIYARBAKIR, (Northern Kurdistan) (Reuters) - More than 100,000 Turkish Kurds celebrated the ancient spring festival of Newroz on Tuesday with dancing, singing and calls for political reform and the release of jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Newroz, which means "new day" in Kurdish, has long served as a rallying call for Kurdish nationalism. Public celebrations were illegal in Turkey before Ocalan's capture in 1999. He is now serving a life prison sentence on an island near Istanbul.

The festivities in Diyarbakir, the largest city of Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, passed fairly peacefully though stone-throwing youths injured nine policemen with riot shields.

Revelers danced around bonfires, waved Kurdish flags and pictures of Ocalan, leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and applauded calls for more cultural and linguistic rights for Turkey's 12 million Kurds.

"The repression of our language and culture must end, our language must be used in schools," Ahmet Turk, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), told the crowd.

"Everything is possible within the EU process," he said.

Under pressure from the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, Ankara has eased restrictions on Kurdish language, though many Kurds want the government to do much more.

Kurdish is an Indo-European language unrelated to Turkish.

"There is some movement, but it does not mean we have our freedom now," said Ali Ihsan Okcu, a 40-year-old municipality worker clutching a picture of Ocalan.

"Ocalan is our leader, the leader of the Kurdish people. There can be no solution of the Kurdish problem without him," he said, expressing a view widely held among Turkey's Kurds.

But most Turks regard Ocalan as a terrorist responsible for the deaths of more than 30,000 people since the PKK launched its armed struggle for an ethnic Kurdish homeland in 1984.

The PKK, which called off a unilateral ceasefire in 2004, is classed as a terrorist group by the EU and the United States.

"The PKK never hurt us. If it was a terrorist organization, you would not see all these people here celebrating and cheering for them and for Ocalan," said Ramazan Ekin, 28, who works at a local cafe.