Kurds Clash With Turkish Police at Fest

ISTANBUL, Turkey - Kurdish demonstrators hurled rocks at Turkish police on Tuesday as more than 75,000 Kurds gathered in a southeastern city for a spring festival and many shouted support for autonomy-seeking guerrillas.

At least eight people were injured, including several policemen, hospital officials said.

In an apparent show of force, Turkish warplanes flew over the demonstrators in Diyarbakir, the largest city in overwhelmingly Kurdish southeastern Turkey.

During the rally, demonstrators unfurled giant pictures and shouted slogans in praise of imprisoned Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan and his guerrilla group, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, television footage showed. The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the
European Union.

Ocalan was captured in 1999 and was sentenced to death for leading a bitter war for autonomy that has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison, which he is serving out as the sole inmate on a prison island near Istanbul.

The spring festival of Nowruz has been the scene of violent clashes in the past, especially in the early 1990s — at the height of a bloody conflict between the Turkish army and Kurdish rebels.