Kurdish Lawmakers Arrested in Turkey : Rights: Two members of Parliament to be charged with treason after immunity is lifted. Move adds to growing sense of political, economic crisis.

Police arrested two leading Kurdish members of Parliament on Wednesday, in a move that added to Turkey’s growing atmosphere of political and economic crisis, escalating nationalist sentiment and diminishing respect for human rights.

Security forces took Hatip Dicle and Orhan Dogan into custody after right-wing parties in Parliament voted to lift the immunity from prosecution of several lawmakers who belong to Turkey’s only legal Kurdish nationalist group, the Democracy Party.

“Whatever they do to us, we will go on saying what we believe,” Dogan said in a corridor of Parliament before police drove him away.

The two men will be charged with treason and may face the death sentence, Turkish state television said.

The Kurdish members of Parliament facing prosecution and arrest may increase to seven. They will probably be joined by Hasan Mezarci, a maverick Islamic fundamentalist member of Parliament who is accused of a crime against the state for insulting Kemal Ataturk, the long dead founder of the secular republic.

The fiery Dicle infuriated many Turks, particularly in the armed forces, when he said a bombing by the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) last month that killed five Turkish army cadets was a justifiable act of war. He is accused of harboring PKK guerrillas.

The other five Kurds have gotten in trouble only on the basis of speeches they made, usually demanding more rights for Turkey’s ethnic Kurds, 20% of Turkey’s 60 million people. “We are only being prosecuted for crimes of thought,” said Ahmet Turk, a Parliament member, who, despite his name, is a leading Kurdish nationalist.

Turk and Leyla Zana, another member of Parliament, have taken the Turkish Kurdish case to Washington and were recently part of a Kurdish delegation received by French President Francois Mitterrand. But the Turkish government seems ready to brave all Western criticism due to a sense of crisis advancing from all fronts.

Western diplomats worry that Prime Minister Tansu Ciller may be ready to fan the flames of Turkish nationalism in a risky bid to buttress her sagging support and deflect worries about the economy. The Turkish lira and financial system are under intense strain after years of poorly managed economic growth fueled by foreign borrowing stumbled in January.

Ciller organized a rally on Monday to “Respect Ataturk,” but only about 10,000 people turned up, some of them true believers but many of them schoolchildren and state workers bused in to Istanbul’s Taksim Square.

Even such public displays, however, may not be enough to preserve Ciller’s regime. Although few diplomats believe a new spate of rumors of an impending coup, nobody rules out military intervention in the politics of a country that has suffered three coups since 1960.

Talk of military unease has been encouraged by the worsening Kurdish insurgency in southeastern Turkey. Almost 11,000 people have been killed there since 1984, and it is now one of the worst areas of open conflict in the Middle East. The secularist officer corps also fears an explosion in votes for Islamic parties in nationwide municipal elections on March 27.

The Kurds have their complaints too, noting that 70 or so activists of the Democracy Party have been killed; they contend the assassins have been protected by the state. “I’ve been in Salvador, and there is no doubt in my mind that these are death squads,” one Western diplomat said.