Mai 1: 'Robocop' Police In Turkey Battle Militants

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'Robocop' Police In Turkey Battle Militants

Istanbul, Turkey (Reuter - May 1, 1998) A large May Day rally in
central Istanbul Friday brought a response by Turkish "Robocop"
riot police wielding batons and firing water cannons.
     The armored police dispersed stone-throwing leftist
militants.
     Witnesses said dozens of demonstrators were injured, most of
them beaten by police, and more than 100 were detained.
     The clash began after some 3,000 riot police backed by
armored cars blocked access by leftists, many wearing red masks
and affiliated with outlawed urban guerrilla groups, to an
official rally at Freedom Monument in the city's Sisli district.
     May Day in Turkey has a legacy of confrontation, with police
and militant groups frequently engaging in pitched battles.
     On May 1, 1977, 37 workers were killed at the hands of
suspected rightist gunmen and three demonstrators died in
fighting with riot police in 1996.
     The feared "Robocops", encased in plastic body armor, are
often accused of heavy handedness at public events that adds to
Turkey's poor human rights image abroad.
     "We live in a country where workers who struggle are
silenced by batons, teargas bombs and dogs", union official Atila
Ongel told thousands assembled in the capital Ankara, to loud
chanted replies of, "Side by side against fascism."
     At the height of the clash in Istanbul, a wall of police,
flanking a pair of armored personnel cars mounted with water
cannon, rushed at the demonstrators with batons flailing.
     Most demonstrators escaped, but police repeatedly struck at
young girls and older women who were unable to get out of the
way. Those who were caught were often pummeled again before being
led away.
     Reuters reporters on the scene estimated the crowd Friday at
more than 70,000, with labor and political delegations at the
front and the radicals bringing up the rear.
     On the fringes of the clashes, right-wing militants and
police badly beat a leftist protester at the local headquarters
of a far-right political party.
     A Reuters Television video tape showed "Grey Wolf" rightists
hanging the protester, a man in his 20s, out of the first-floor
window of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) building as police
and other members of a 100-strong crowd of rightists beat him.
     Rightists forced journalists away from the scene and the
man's fate was not known.
     Labor leaders addressing crowds in Istanbul and Ankara
reiterated demands for expanded rights to strike, better pay and
curbs on rampant inflation and high unemployment.
     Bayram Meral, the head of the big Turk-Is union
confederation, said Turkey's workers suffered hardest from the
country's lackluster economic performance.
     "The unjust distribution of income and regional economic
imbalances have become main economic problems in their own
right", he said in remarks prepared for delivery in Istanbul.
     Official commemorations took place across Turkey, where the
traditional day of labor power retains its powerful appeal.
     About 1,000 protesters staged a sit-down protest in the
center of Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the mainly Kurdish
southeast where demonstrations are banned under emergency rule.

-- 
Press Agency Ozgurluk
For justice, democracy and human rights in Turkey and Kurdistan!
Website: http://www.ozgurluk.org                          
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