Tens of thousands of Kurds gathered under tight security across Turkey on Sunday to mark Newroz, their new year, calling on the government to fulfill pledges to broaden Kurdish freedoms.
The festivities, often mired in violence and bloodshed in the past, passed without major incidents, but police detained nearly 30 people in Istanbul.
Marking the arrival of spring, Newroz Day has become a platform for Kurds to demand broader rights and voice support for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), waging a bloody separatist campaign in the Kurdish-majority southeast.
The largest crowd gathered in Diyarbakir, the biggest city of the region, where 3,000 officers were on duty and police helicopters overflew the packed festival venue.
Officials were not immediately available to provide an attendance figure, but estimates ranged from 200,000 to 400,000 people.
Demonstrators brandished posters of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan as songs praising the PKK blared from loudspeakers. Women clad in colorful traditional dresses danced and waved flags in the Kurdish colors of red, yellow and green.
“Democratic solution or democratic resistance,” one banner read as hardliners chanted: “Blood for blood, we are with you Ocalan.”
Speakers criticized Ankara over a faltering initiative to mend fences with the Kurds, which was announced last year, but has produced little result so far.
Selahattin Demirtas, head of Turkey’s main Kurdish political movement, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), slammed Ankara for branding the PKK a “terrorist” organization and rejecting dialogue with the group.
“There are no terrorists, there is a people’s movement and its leader,” he said, referring to Ocalan, jailed for life in 1999.
In a message read out at the gathering, Ocalan accused Ankara of “flinching from a democratic solution” to the conflict.
Large crowds celebrated the day in other towns in the southeast as well as in Istanbul, home to a large Kurdish migrant community, where police detained 29 people, among them 17 minors, for chanting pro-PKK slogans and displaying rebel banners, Anatolia news agency reported.
In a statement issued on Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appealed for reconciliation, saying the traditional Newroz bonfires should signify “the light of love, friendship and fraternity and not the fire of violence and hatred.”
In August, his government announced plans to expand Kurdish freedoms in a bid to erode popular support for the PKK and end the insurgency, which has claimed 45,000 lives since its outbreak in 1984.
The initiative faltered in December, however, when seven soldiers were killed in a PKK ambush and the constitutional court outlawed the BDP’s predecessor for links to the PKK, sparking deadly protests and street violence.
Ankara said it remained committed to reform, but is yet to take concrete steps.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
BEYOND WASHINGTON: Although historically the US has been the partner of choice for military exercises, Jakarta has been trying to diversify its partners, an analyst said Indonesia’s first joint military drills with Russia this week signal that new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would seek a bigger role for Jakarta on the world stage as part of a significant foreign policy shift, analysts said. Indonesia has long maintained a neutral foreign policy and refuses to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or US-China rivalry, but Prabowo has called for stronger ties with Moscow despite Western pressure on Jakarta. “It is part of a broader agenda to elevate ties with whomever it may be, regardless of their geopolitical bloc, as long as there is a benefit for Indonesia,” said Pieter
US ELECTION: Polls show that the result is likely to be historically tight. However, a recent Iowa poll showed Harris winning the state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020 US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours. The Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win over the last holdouts with less than 36 hours left until polls open on election day today. Trump predicted a “landslide,” while Harris told a raucous rally in must-win Michigan that “we have momentum — it’s
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
RSS