Turkish Military, Guerrillas Escalate Battle of Wills

This nation’s highest appeals court on Monday upheld the detention of six Kurdish members of Parliament accused of treason, while in the war-scarred countryside, security forces and Marxist guerrillas fought a battle of wills in a struggle that is polarizing this key country at the crossroads of the Balkans and the Middle East.

In Kurdish-dominated areas of southeastern Turkey, Monday was Nowruz, an ancient regional festival greeting the first day of spring. In recent years, celebrations of folk dancing and fire-jumping had become a stage for bloody protests by Turkish Kurds seeking greater ethnic and political rights.

At least two people died in a police raid in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir on Monday, and Kurdish leaders reported about 200 arrests, but most people stayed home.

The Turkish armed forces flooded the southeast with troops, and, atypically, invited Kurds to celebrate a festival that has long triggered official disapproval. In response, the guerrillas, who seek an independent Kurdish state, instructed people to stay off the streets.

It was a draw Monday in the distant, rural and poor region where about half of Turkey’s 12 million Kurds live and about 11,000 people have died in the decade-long struggle between guerrillas and the armed forces.

“Once again the people were trapped in the middle,” reported Mettin Corabatir, a Turkish television newsman, as cameras panned through tense streets patrolled by gunmen in civilian clothes and soldiers in uniform.

The balance of terror gripping the southeast has drawn fire from international human rights activists, who accuse both the armed forces and guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party of major abuses.

More than 800 villages have been forcibly evacuated--some of them destroyed--in an army drive to isolate the guerrillas, who often murder country folk who shun their cause. Hundreds of Kurdish leaders in the southeast have been slain, and arbitrary arrest and torture are routine tools of state repression, human rights groups charge.

Seven radical Kurdish members of Parliament were arrested earlier this month after being stripped of their parliamentary immunity. They allegedly expressed support for guerrillas fighting for a separate state for the 20 million to 30 million Kurds, a non-Turkic, non-Arabic people who speak their own language but lack their own country.

The Turkish constitution asserts that there are no minorities in Turkey. Calls for Kurdish rights, therefore, are treasonable in the view of government officials.

Lawyers for the jailed Kurds argued that lifting their immunity was illegal.

On Monday, as widely anticipated by Turkish observers, the country’s constitutional court disagreed. It freed one of the deputies on a technicality, but confirmed detention of the rest.