TRKNWS-L NEWS from Vic McDonald

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From: newsdesk_aps_nl at apsf.aps.nl (newsdesk at aps.nl)
Subject: TRKNWS-L NEWS from Vic McDonald


TURKISH CLASHES SPILL INTO GERMANY

 VIOLENCE:  BONN FEARS A NEW ANTI-FOREIGNER BACKLASH.

By
Alan Cowell

New York Times

BONN, Germany -- A wave of firebombings of Turkish mosques, travel agencies
and cultural centers has confronted Germany with a perilous spillover of
Turkey's own deepening divisions, raising fears that they could spawn a new
xenophobic backlash among Germans.

Two million Turks live in Germany, splintered along the same notions of
identity that are increasingly dividing Turkey's 60 million people into camps
of Alawites and Islamic fundamentalists, secularists and Kurdish separatists.
They were invited into the country as ''guest workers'' to drive the postwar
building boom, and many have never returned home.

As turmoil has seized Turkey -- reflected most recently in the Turkish army's
incursion into northern Iraq and clashes between Alawites and the police in
Istanbul -- divisions and fear have begun to spread among Turks in Germany.

''We do not know where the next attack will come from,'' said Farouk Sen,
head of the Institute for Turkish Studies in Essen, Germany. ''So people are
very frightened.''

SCORES OF ATTACKS

Over the past two weeks, assailants with gasoline bombs have struck scores of
times at Turkish institutions in many parts of Germany -- banks in Cologne
and Gelsenkirchen, a newspaper advertising office in Berlin, a Turkish
cultural institute in Erlenbach. No one has publicly taken responsibility.

The German authorities, however, have blamed the separatist Kurdish Workers
Party, an outlawed Marxist-Leninist movement, for most of these nighttime
attacks. While no one has died in the attacks, they have left a sense of
vulnerability among Turks, and a feeling among Turkish Kurds that other Turks
here have turned against them.

''There have been arguments in the schools between Kurdish and Turkish
pupils,'' said Hassan Yildiz, a Kurdish mathematician in Berlin. ''Up to now
it's been verbal. Soon it could be for real.''

 TURKISH UNDERWORLD

The Kurdish Workers Party, known by its Kurdish initials, PKK, is believed to
be seeking to disrupt tourism in retaliation for Germany's decision in 1993
to outlaw it as a terrorist organization.

But the German authorities also confront another spinoff from the decades of
close ties with Turkey. The postwar relationship made Germany an economic
magnet, but also produced a Turkish underworld of organized crime, secretive
left- and right-wing extremist groups and widespread fund-raising activities
for Islamic fundamentalists and Kurdish separatists.

''The worst thing of all'' about the current violence, said Freimut Duwe, an
opposition Social Democratic expert on Turkey, ''is that it creates an
atmosphere in which Germans as such become less willing to accept the
existence of large minorities. The hatred toward the Turks is growing in
Germany.''

Such comments reflect concerns that German right-wing extremists and
neo-Nazis may again feel emboldened to attack Turks in their campaigns
against foreigners.

The German authorities themselves seem unable to shake free of their
ambiguous attitude toward Turkey.

KURDS ARE SUSPICIOUS

The readiness of Germany to sell arms, including armored cars, to Turkey and
its outlawing of the PKK leave some Kurds with the suspicion that it has
taken sides against them, even though the weapons are not supposed to be used
in the 10-year-old war against the PKK.

Equally, though, the desire of Germany to distance itself from the horrors of
its past makes it reluctant to expel Kurds convicted of crimes or to refuse
asylum. The reluctance stems from suspicions that Kurds face systematic
persecution in Turkey.

The policy has prompted some Turks here to say that Bonn is tacitly
supporting the PKK, which has staged frequent protests in Germany, including
the occupation of the Turkish Consulate in Munich in 1993 and sit-down
protests on German highways last year.

According to unofficial estimates, the Turkish population in Germany breaks
down roughly into 400,000 to 600,000 Alawites, 400,000 Kurds and more than 1
million ethnic Turks. The figures are uncertain, though, because many Kurds
-- particularly those from the Tunceli region of eastern Turkey -- are also
Alawites, members of an Islamic sect held to be heretical by Islamic
fundamentalists.

MERCURY CENTER      Transmitted:  95-03-26 06:11:53 EST

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