AP Features, March 20th, 2007
Turkish authorities said Tuesday they would not tolerate illegal demonstrations by Kurdish activists during an upcoming spring festival, while reinforcing security around the country against possible trouble.
Turkey is gearing up for the Nowruz festival on Wednesday, celebrated largely by the country's Kurdish population, and traditionally used as an opportunity to highlight separatist demands by Kurdish rebels.
Authorities in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish-dominated southeast, on Tuesday banned chanting of some separatist slogans.
Local authorities expected a turnaround close to 100,000 people in Diyarbakir, but organizers said they hoped the event would peaceful. Police in Diyarbakir were planning to deploy 2,500 officers, while Kurdish organizers were planning to field an equal number of people in charge of security.
"I hope Nowruz will be celebrated in Diyarbakir in peace, with no one's nose bleeding," Seyhmus Diken, an adviser to Diyarbakir's pro-Kurdish mayor, Osman Baydemir, said.
The southern city of Mersin, police reinforcements were coming from nearby cities, and time off for officers in the eastern city of Van was canceled, reports said.
In Istanbul, Gov. Muammer Guler said authorities would not tolerate any illegal action.
"No one should tend toward actions that would disrupt public order," Guler told a news conference. "The disruption of peace and order in Istanbul will never be allowed."
Guler said violators would have to pay the price of their actions.
Pro-Kurdish activists urged calm, but authorities still expected some trouble by supporters of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, formed by the imprisoned rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan.
For Kurds, the festival is an occasion to assert their cultural identity, and this year tensions are running high amid the arrests of dozens of pro-Kurdish politicians on charges of ties to separatist rebels. Turkey also has said medical tests showed Ocalan was not poisoned, despite his laywers' claims.
Past festivities have ended in bloody riots that claimed dozens of lives.
Kurds celebrate Nowruz _ the Farsi word for new year _ on March 21, along with peoples in Iran and many central Asian Turkic republics. They sing songs and jump over the flames of burning car tires, symbolically burning away the impurities and memories of the past.
"This fire does not symbolize the fury in souls but love and friendship. I invite everyone to be foresighted and careful," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday.
However, Murat Karayilan, a Kurdish rebel commander, said the celebrations should serve as a reminder of the unity of the Kurdish people in the face of what he called "an attack against Kurdish leader Ocalan," the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency reported Tuesday.
Karayilan warned that Turkey would be responsible for a "mad war" that would develop if it did not agree to rebel demands, and called on Kurds to relay this message during the Nowruz celebrations.
The group has been fighting more than two decades for autonomy in Turkey's southeast in a war that has left some 37,000 people dead.
