ANKARA, Feb 11 (AFP) - Turkey has arrested 59 members of the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HADEP) in the past month for backing a campaign to introduce Kurdish-language courses in universities and schools, the party said on Monday.
Security forces initially rounded up more than 200 members of HADEP's youth branches in several cities and later formally arrested 59 of them, a party statement said.

The detainees faced charges of promoting the education campaign under orders from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a 15-year war for self-rule in southeast Turkey, a HADEP official told AFP.

The campaign started last November in Istanbul, where university students submitted petitions asking for courses in Kurdish, and quickly spread to universities and schools across the country.

Authorities arrested several hundred signatories to the petitions and categorically ruled out providing education in the Kurdish language, which is banned under the Turkish constitution.

Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership, is under pressure to grant its Kurds cultural freedoms in line with prevailing EU standards.

In October, Turkey passed a set of constitutional reforms that paved the way for the Kurds to broadcast and publish material in their mother tongue.

But Kurdish-language education was left outside the scope of the reforms due to fears it could fan nationalist sentiment among the Kurdis minority and rekindle separatist violence in the mainly-Kurdish southeast.

Officials say the campaign is masterminded and directed by the PKK as part of a "civil disobedience" strategy developed after September 1999, when the PKK said it was laying down its arms to seek a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish conflict, which has claimed some 36,600 lives since 1984.