Turkey: Fear of Friday-protests

Fri Sep 5 11:08:19 BST 1997

              Extreme left tries channeling Friday protests

  _________________________________________________________________

 By M. Akif Beki / Turkish Daily News

Istanbul - The Islamist anger reflected at the Friday protests, has
set high hopes for extreme leftist organisations. The DHKP-C
(Revolutionary People's Salvation Party - Front), one of the bloody
leftist terrorist organisations, has began to call on the radical
Islamist masses reacting against the educational reform bill, to join
its front.

The harsh appearance of the Friday demonstrations encourages the
Markist-Leninist leftist organisations to pull the radical potential
in the mosques into the underground. The illegal leftist publications
argue that freedom of faith and education for the public cannot be
obtained under the present regime; therefore, islamists reacting
against the closure of the secondary religious schools should fight
against the so-called imperialist regime, side by side with the
leftist organisations.

The DHKP-C put itself forward as the only organisation fighting
against the regime's oppression, in the last edition of its
publication, Kurtulus (Salvation) dated August 23. In the magazine,
the Friday protestors are criticized strongly for not targetting the
regime directly. The magazine invites the radical Islamist groups to
join forces against the so-called regime of oppression.

Kurtulus magazine uses some Islamic concepts such as oppression and
rights and statements similar to verses from Koran to convince the
Islamists and the radical potential of the Friday demonstrators to
become terrorists.

In particular, Kurtulus tries to damage the Islamists' trust in the
legal regime. The magazine seriously criticizes the political
representatives of the Islamists and claims that the Welfare Party
(RP) is a part of the oppressive regime, not an alternative to it. It
defines the democratic struggle by different political tendencies as a
common-interest fight among sisters of the regime.

The magazine finishes the article with the following slogan: "The
source of oppression is the regime itself. The ones that oppress are
the same ones that have interest in the continuation of this system.
Islamists who say they are against oppression, if you are sincere, the
oppressive order is before us. Let's fight it altogether."

It still remains uncertain how radical Islamists attending Friday
protests will respond to this call in their own publications.
  _________________________________________________________________

IHD raps government for Peace Train ban and detentions

  _________________________________________________________________

 By Metin Demirsar / Turkish Daily News

Istanbul - Turkish human rights campaigners Thursday criticized Prime
Minister Mesut Yilmaz's government for obstructing a group of 171
foreign human rights activists from attending a World Peace Day rally
in southeast Turkey and preventing them from holding a news conference
in Istanbul.

The human rights activists, who returned to Istanbul this week after
attempting to attend Monday's rally in Diyarbakir, were harassed by
police during the whole duration of the trip and also in Istanbul,
campaigners said.

They also accused the administration of ordering the detentions of
nearly 1,000 people who attended the rally, aimed at ending the
13-year conflict between Turks and separatist Kurds in southeast
Turkey.

"This government has opened a war against a peace initiative with
unparalleled brutality," Ercan Kaner, head of the Istanbul branch of
the Human Rights Association (IHD) told a news conference. "There are
powerful forces in the government that want the conflict (in southeast
Turkey) to continue."

Kaner described the government as a pawn of the military-dominated
National Security Council, a shadow cabinet that advises the
administration.

The foreign human rights campaigners, mostly European, American and
African writers, intellectuals, clergy and parliamentarians, were
members of the so-called Musa Anter Peace Train, an initiative named
after a prominent Kurdish writer and intellectual killed by
unidentified gunmen in 1992.

They were supposed to travel to Diyarbakir from Brussels by train, but
ended up flying to Turkey instead when the government banned the train
from entering Turkish territory.

The participants travelled to the region by bus, but were held in the
garden of the headquarters of the special police in Sanliurfa
overnight and prevented from entering Diyarbakir province.

  The return trip

Police stopped the bus carrying the activists in Gebze as they were
returning to Istanbul Tuesday night and detained 20 mainly Turkish
human rights campaigners accompanying the group.

Many of the participants were also forced to find rooms in other
hotels when their reservations were mysteriously cancelled. Some 21
activists were detained at the MIM Hotel in Istanbul and many injured
in a melee with the police.

The foreigners were also prevented from giving a news conference in
Istanbul on Thursday.

Kaner was flanked by Dicle Anter, son of the late Musa Anter; Hikmet
Fidan, provincial head of the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party
(HADEP); Mahmut Sakar, a lawyer and vice president of IHD; and Ismail
Sarioglu, a executive committee member of the Istanbul IHD office.

The government from the outset viewed the peace initiative with
suspicion, claiming it was organized by the Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK), a separatist Kurdish group fighting a bloody guerilla war in
southeast Turkey.

More than 20,000 civilians, soldiers and guerrillas have been killed
in Turkey since the PKK launched its insurgency for an independent
Kurdish state in the southeast in 1984.

-- 
Press Agency Ozgurluk
The Struggle for justice, democracy and human rights in Turkey and Kurdistan
http://www.ozgurluk.org                     
mailto:ozgurluk at xs4all.nl  mailinglists:petidomo at ozgurluk.xs4all.nl
List info: english-request at ozgurluk.xs4all.nl