Kurdish Leaders In Turkish Court Fo

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

From: Arm The Spirit <ats at locust.cic.net>
Subject: Kurdish Leaders In Turkish Court For Rebel Links

Kurdish Leaders In Turkish Court For Rebel Links

Ankara, Turkey (Reuter - September 25, 1996) The leadership of
Turkey's only legal Kurdish political party went on trial on
Wednesday, charged with links to separatist guerrillas battling
security forces for self-rule in the country's southeast.
     Eighteen senior figures in the People's Democracy Party
(HADEP), including leader Murat Bozlak, were accused of acting as
a front for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebel group.
     They face up to 22 1/2 years in jail. Another 23, mostly
party members, could get up to 15 years under a lesser charge.
     "HADEP is active in trying to get our citizens of Kurdish
origin to join the PKK, form grassroot support for the PKK and
send militants to the mountains", prosecutor Nuh Mete Yuksel told
Ankara State Security Court.
     The Turkish armed forces stepped up operations against the
PKK this week, with airplanes and attack helicopters assaulting
the rebels' remote mountain redoubts.
     Security officials in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir
said 47 guerrillas died in the latest counter-insurgency drive.
Anatolian news agency said six from the security forces died.
     Party leader Bozlak denied any ties to the rebels. "HADEP
has no link at all with any illegal organisation", he told the
court, packed with relatives, Western diplomats and human rights
observers.
     He predicted that the stifling of non-violent Kurdish
dissent would only prolong the bloodshed.
     "It's clear that a policy of denial and assimilation has got
nowhere and will go nowhere", he said. "The problem will grow."
     Turkey has been criticised by some of its Western allies for
refusing to give separate cultural and educational rights to its
estimated 12 million Kurds.
     The European Parliament threatened last week to block
hundreds of millions of dollars of European Union aid to Turkey,
saying that previous rights promises had not been fulfilled.
     "The EU is defintely focused on this trial after last week's
decision", a European diplomat told Reuters.
     A similar trial of Kurdish MPs two years ago almost killed
off Turkey's ambitions for a customs union with Europe, granted
in late 1995.
     The HADEP defendants were detained in June after masked
youths tore down a large Turkish flag adorning a party congress
and replaced it with the banner of the rebel group and its leader
Abdullah Ocalan.
     "This looks like a pretext to ban HADEP. It's following a
particular pattern where the Kurdish parties get banned one after
the other", said Louise Christian, a British rights monitor.
     The party was formed in 1994 after another Kurdish party was
closed by the constitutional court for alleged separatism and 13
of its deputies expelled from parliament. Six Kurd MPs were later
sent to jail for links to the PKK.
     Meanwhile, eleven people died in a riot over prison
condition by PKK inmates at a jail in Diyarbakir on Tuesday.
     HADEP does not advocate violence and stops short of calling
for Kurdish self-rule. The party's platform for recognition of
Kurds as a distinct ethnic group got short shrift in court.
     "There is only one identity in Turkey and that is the
Turkish identity", prosecutor Yuksel said, reading out the
charges.
     "Requests for acknowledgement of a Kurdish cultural identity
are underhand moves aimed at splitting the country. The state is
one, the country is one, the nation is one", he said.
     The trial is expected to last several months.