Turkish Police Break Up Preelection Rally by Kurds; 4,000 Reportedly Held

Days before national elections, baton-wielding police in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir broke up a preelection rally Tuesday by Turkey’s only legal Kurdish party, witnesses and party officials said.

Thousands of people who had gathered in the town’s central square were dispersed by police, and 4,000 of them were detained at a sports center, witnesses said. Turkish television showed dozens of people being beaten by the police and several women being dragged by the hair into police vans.

Kurds, although a minority in Turkey, are the majority ethnic group in Turkey’s impoverished southeast. The People’s Democracy Party is favored to win control of dozens of city councils there in elections Sunday--an outcome that Turkish officials fear would be a step toward Kurdish self-rule, which the party advocates and the government opposes.

A Diyarbakir journalist said police were deployed throughout the city at 5 a.m. Tuesday to prevent tens of thousands of the party’s supporters from attending the rally, which had been banned for what the governor’s office called security reasons.

Diyarbakir’s police chief said 290 people were detained--far fewer than the number counted by witnesses who were interviewed by telephone.

Feridun Celik, the Kurdish party’s mayoral candidate in Diyarbakir, said five party members running for parliament were among the detained. The authorities “are doing everything possible to stop us from winning,” he said.

Police pressure on the party has been mounting since the Feb. 15 arrest of Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish guerrilla leader, who is awaiting trial on treason charges for his role in a 15-year separatist war that has left about 30,000 dead.

In response, Ocalan’s followers have stepped up attacks in Turkish cities in recent weeks, killing dozens of civilians in a string of bombings.

A day after Ocalan’s arrest, police rounded up several thousand supporters of the People’s Democracy Party and held them in prison nearly a week. Many said they were tortured.

Turkey’s chief prosecutor has asked the Constitutional Court to ban the party, calling it a political front and a recruiting arm for the guerrillas. Party chairman Murat Bozlak is in jail in Ankara, the capital, awaiting trial and faces up to 22 years in prison for alleged membership in the armed movement.

Many party members voice sympathy for Ocalan and refer to the Kurdish warlord as serok, or leader. Some party supporters equate votes for the party with support for the guerrillas, whose appeal is enhanced by the region’s poverty and by decades of Turkish crackdowns on advocates of Kurdish self-rule.

For their part, moderate Kurdish leaders opposed to the guerrillas’ violent methods fault the government for failing to seize on Ocalan’s arrest as an opportunity to work with them to solve the conflict peacefully.

“We do not want independence,” one such leader, Serafettin Elci, said in a recent interview, “but we do want our culture, language and identity to be officially recognized.”

Elci’s conciliatory stance has failed to impress Turkish authorities. Two weeks after Ocalan’s arrest, they banned his Democratic Masses Party on charges of promoting separatism, making it the fourth Kurdish party shut down in recent years.