Four Dead in Fresh Kurdish Riots in Turkey
03/04/2006| IslamWeb
A molotov cocktail attack set ablaze a bus in Istanbul, resulting in three deaths, as Kurdish riots rattling southeast Turkey for six days spread to the west, the CNN Turk news channel reported.
Another person was killed in clashes in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, bringing the death toll from a week of violence to 12.
A group of protestors hurled a molotov cocktail onto a bus in Istanbul's Bagcilar suburb and an elderly woman who got off in panic from the burning vehicle was hit by a car in the street, dying in hospital, CNN Turk said.
Two more bodies were recovered after police removed the wreckage of the bus, which crashed into a truck while maneuvering to escape the hit, it said.
Another woman passenger was seriously injured.
Television footage showed firefighters battling the flames engulfing the bus, which was reduced to a blackened skeleton.
Police officials contacted by AFP declined to comment.
A group of angry residents who gathered at the site chanted slogans against Kurdish separatism, NTV television reported.
A fourth person, a 22-year-old Kurdish man, was killed by gunfire in the southeastern town of Kiziltepe, near the Syrian border, where street battles between rioters and the police flared for a second day in row, a senior local Kurdish politician, Ferhan Turk, told AFP.
Three others were injured, he said. Officials were not immediately available for comment.
An angry crowd torched a bank and vandalized public buildings, party offices and shops in Kiziltepe Saturday, prompting the security forces to fire warning shots and use tear gas, killing one person.
Also in Istanbul, home to a sizeable Kurdish immigrant community, about 200 protestors, some of them wearing masks, took to the streets in the city center earlier Sunday, setting fire to a truck and hurling Molotov cocktails, 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 Tuesday in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast, 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 of the violence were children, one aged only three, and most of the injured were security forces.
Officials charged that the unrest was orchestrated by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged an armed separatist campaign against the government since 1984, with the conflict claiming some 37,000 lives.
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 program 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. "The (Kurdish) people believe they are still regarded as a kind of quasi-citizens."
The southeast had enjoyed relative calm in recent years after the PKK declared a unilateral truce in 1999 and Ankara, under European Union pressure, granted the Kurds a measure of cultural rights, lifted emergency rule in the region and began compensating villagers who had suffered in the conflict.
Tensions have been on the rise, however, since June 2004, when the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey, the EU and the United States, called off the five-year ceasefire.
Compared to much more hardline practices in the past, the response of the security forces was more restrained this time, apparently to avoid damage to relations with the EU.
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