Thousands of Kurds Mourn PKK Hunger

[kurdeng at aps.nl]

Subject: Thousands of Kurds Mourn PKK Hunger-Striker

; Sun, 06 Aug 1995 00:30:16 -0800


       By Hans-Juergen Moritz
    BERLIN, Aug 1 (Reuter) - Some 10,000 Kurds gathered to pay their last
respects on Tuesday to a hunger-striker who died last week after an
eight-day fast in solidarity with Kurdish prisoners in Turkey.
    Officials had warned of possible violence at the rally, after a week
of some two dozen firebomb attacks on Turkish targets in Germany which
police have attributed to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
    But marchers, holding pictures of the dead woman, proceeded peacefully
from Kreuzberg district towards Breitscheid Platz square in the centre of
west Berlin.
    Many shouted slogans such as ``Kanther is a terrorist'' -- referring
to German Interior Minister Manfred Kanther.
    Turkish targets have been hit repeatedly by firebombs but police said
on Tuesday a fire overnight in a Turkish house in the city of Bochum was
not, as had at first been thought, arson.
    Mourners threw flowers onto the coffin of 41-year-old Gulnaz
Bagiztani, a mother of five who died last week after fasting with hundreds
of other Kurds in Germany.
    Draped over it was the flag of the banned PKK, fighting Ankara for
independence or autonomy in southeast Turkey and banned in Germany since
1993 for staging violent protests here.
    Some 3,000 police were on hand, although the number of demonstrators
and mourners given by police remained well below the 40,000 which
organisers had said would attend.
    Berlin city authorities say Bagiztani was exhausted by the hunger
strike and the summer heat, but Kurdish militants have claimed she died
from being manhandled when police broke up the vigil in which she was
taking part.
    The dead woman is due to be buried on Wednesday in the northern city
of Osnabrueck, where she had been living since March 1995.
    In a statement on Monday the Kurdistan National Liberation Front
(ERNK), the PKK's political wing, accused Germany of pursuing a ``fascist,
chauvinist policy towards the Kurdish people's liberation struggle.''

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 * Origin: APS Amsterdam (aps.nl), bbs +31-20-6842147 (16:31/2.0)