Turkey Relatively Calm as Kurdish Rebels Begin Cease-Fire

The first cease-fire in more than eight years of Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish rebellion took a shaky hold Sunday, reinforcing hopes that the chief domestic problem of this key Eurasian state may be on the road to a solution.

Both Turks and Kurds showed unusual restraint during picnics, dancing parties and demonstrations for Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year celebration of the first day of spring. Sunday was also the first day of an unprecedented 25-day, unilateral cease-fire announced by the rebel army of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).

Not everything was quiet. A teen-age boy was killed and six people were wounded after police opened fire on a crowd in the southern city of Adana. Some beatings and arrests of demonstrators were reported in southeastern Turkey, home to about half of Turkey’s 12 million Kurds. But there was no repeat of last year’s violence in which the security forces killed more than 92 Kurds.

Most of last year’s deaths were in this Tigris River town on Turkey’s border with Syria and Iraq. Sunday, there were tense moments here, with shooting in the air when Turkish police broke up a peaceful Kurdish open-air dancing party.

“We really hope a new period has started. People here have suffered a lot,” said Cizre Mayor Hashem Hashemi. The chief of Turkey’s Human Rights Assn., Akin Birdal, said: “Things are now normal. We just want the Turkish state to respond to the peace call.”

Nobody expects any immediate Turkish response to the cease-fire of the PKK rebels, formally denounced by the United States and most Western nations as terrorists. But neither does anyone doubt that peace would bring great economic and moral benefits to Turkey, already valued as a Western ally of rare stability between the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East.