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Protester killed; unrest hits Istanbul
Web posted at: 4/3/2006 2:0:42
Source ::: AFP
A fireman extinguishing a truck set ablaze by Kurdish demonstrators, following a demonstration in Istanbul, yesterday.

DIYARBAKIR: A ninth person was reported to have died yesterday in the violence that has flared in south-east Turkey for the past week in the most serious urban disturbances to hit the region in a decade. The latest victim, a 22-year-old man, was killed by gunfire in Kiziltepe, near the Syrian border, a senior local Kurdish politician, Ferhan Turk, said.

Three others were injured, he said. Officials were not immediately available for comment. Violence erupted there again after an angry crowd torched a bank and vandalised public buildings, party offices and shops on Saturday, prompting the security forces to fire warning shots and use tear gas, killing one person.

The unrest over the past week has revived memories of the height of a Kurdish rebellion that has claimed more than 37,000 lives. Unrest also spread to Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, which is home to a sizeable Kurdish immigrant community.

About 200 protestors, some of them wearing masks, took to the streets in downtown Istanbul, setting fire to a truck and hurling petrol bombs, stones and bottles at the riot police, who responded with truncheons and pepper gas.

Several protestors, running from the police, were attacked by a group of residents in a mainly Roma neighborhood wielding knives and sticks and shouting nationalist slogans. At least seven demonstrators were detained, the Anatolia news agency said.

Ahmet Turk, the co-chairman of Turkey’s main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), urged an end to the violence and called on Ankara to come up with far-reaching reforms to make permanent peace with its largest minority.

The riots erupted on Tuesday in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish south-east, after hundreds of youths demanding vengeance attacked the police following the funerals of Kurdish rebels killed in fighting with the army. Three of the victims were children. Officials blamed the unrest on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has waged an armed separatist campaign against the government since 1984.

Ahmet Turk described the riots as the explosion of entangled political, social and economic problems that have plagued the southeast, Turkey’s poorest region, for decades. He called for a comprehensive government programme for the south-east that would include the improvement of Kurdish cultural and political rights, economic and social development and a general amnesty for the PKK.

“How can you resolve the problem only with the stick, with repression and silencing? We want this mentality to change,” he told CNN-Turk television. “The (Kurdish) people believe they are still regarded as a kind of quasi-citizens.”

 
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