Kurdish Sympathizers Being Slain in Turkey : Rebellion: Nine of more than 60 civilian victims were journalists. Police fail to find any of the killers.

The killing of a ninth journalist in Turkey’s troubled southeast has sparked new unease about the rising murder toll of civilian sympathizers with Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish rebels, diplomats and human rights monitors said Monday.

The latest and most prominent victim was Musa Anter, 74, a Kurdish newspaper commentator, author and grand old man of the Turkish Kurds’ struggle for cultural rights, who was gunned down Sunday night on a street in the city of Diyarbakir.

Diplomats say more than 60 Kurdish sympathizers have been killed in similar fashion in the past 15 months in Turkey. None of the killers have been found by the Turkish police.

“We’re unhappy about the situation. It’s getting to the point where we may soon have to react,” said one Western diplomat in Ankara.

The killers are not known, nor has there been any concrete sign of a comprehensive police investigation.

One of those slain was a Turkish reporter for the mass-circulation Sabah newspaper. Sabah accused the security forces of killing him, and television film suggested that the reporter was hit by unprovoked army machine-gun fire on a group of reporters running with a white flag.

Turkish Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel, his interior minister and the Turkish chief of staff have dismissed all journalist slayings as cases of militants falling victim to internal battles.

In August, the human rights monitoring group Helsinki Watch said it was appalled by the killings, adding in a report, “These murders suggest an ongoing campaign to silence the dissident press in the southeast.”

A new hard-line Turkish approach was evidenced by two days of heavy anti-rebel army action in the provincial town of Sirnak in mid-August, according to a report by Lord Avebury, a senior British member of Parliament and human rights activist.

The cause of the fighting is disputed--Ankara says the rebels attacked, the rebels deny it. Fourteen civilians and four members of the security forces were killed. Barely a house was left undamaged, and witnesses told Lord Avebury of tanks firing on buildings and of soldiers burning and looting.

Western diplomats say they have several reasons for not criticizing their ally’s handling of the 8-year-old rebellion among its 12 million Kurds, half of whom live in the southeast of the country along the Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian borders. Turkey is a vital base for reconnaissance flights over northern Iraq, where the allies’ main mission, ironically, is to protect Iraq’s rebellious ethnic Kurds from attack by Baghdad.

Turkey is also a strategic ally helping to build a secular, Western-oriented bridge to the new Muslim Turkic republics of the former Soviet Union. And Turkey’s Kurdish rebels are Marxist, based in Syria and probably in Iran and, according to Turkey, helped by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Arms deals cement Turkey’s ties to the West. Ankara on Monday chose to buy 75 U.S. Black Hawk helicopters made by the Connecticut-based Sikorsky firm, mainly to help fight the rebels. The first 25 will be delivered soon, and manufacture of the remaining 50 in the $855-million deal will start in Turkey within eighteen months, Prime Minister Demirel said.