Kurds rampage for fifth day

THE death toll from a week of violent street clashes between Kurdish youths and security forces in Turkey rose to eight overnight with fresh riots near the Syrian border.

The violence, the worst in the predominantly southeast Kurdish region for years, has been flaring since Tuesday, raising fears of renewed ethnic bloodshed in the EU-hopeful country.

One person was killed and 16 others, including seven policemen, were injured as stone-throwing demonstrators battled special police units in Kiziltepe, near the Syrian border, local Governor Mehmet Kilclar told Anatolia news agency.

He said 30 rioters were detained during the violence in which an angry crowd stoned shops, torched a bank and ransacked a tax office, prompting security forces to respond with tear gas and warning shots.

Protestors also vandalized the offices of the ruling Justice and Development Party and an opposition party.

Special forces were deployed in the town, where stones and overturned garbage bins littered the streets, an AFP photographer said.

Scuffles were also reported in Silopi, at the Iraqi border, and Yuksekova, further to the east.

The clashed erupted Tuesday in Diyarbakir, the central city of the region, when Kurdish youths shouting "vengence" attacked police after funerals for separatist Kurdish militants killed in fighting with the army.

Three children were among the victims of the riots.

On Friday, a bomb blast in Istanbul claimed by a radical Kurdish group as a reprisal for the victims, killed one person, while seven Kurdish rebels were reported killed in an army operation in a mountainous area in the southeast.

The riots shattered a relative peace the region had enjoyed in recent years as Ankara, keen to join the European Union, enacted a series of reforms to mend fences with the large and restive Kurdish minority.

Tension has been on the rise since June 2004 when the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) called off a five-year unilateral ceasefire.

The conflict has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984 when the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara, the EU and the United States, took up arms for self-rule in the southeast.

The PKK is demanding general amnesty for its militants and freedom for its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Life in Diyarbakir, where six people were killed, appeared to return to normal on Saturday as shopkeeprs repaired broken windows and workers removed piles of stones from the streets.

But the underlying atmosphere of anxiety was palpable.

Even though many Kurds sympathize with the PKK, residents pondered the prospect of renewed conflict, wary that mounting violence would discourage investment from western Turkey and deepen their already rampant poverty.

"We had only recently begun to stand on our feet... Those incidents took us 10 years behind. It will be hard to mend our image," said Riza Yucel as he cleaned his perfumery, ransacked by the rioters.

The owner of a newspaper kiosk, who declined to be named, also denounced the riots, but grumbled that Ankara had failed to make any move to encourage PKK rebels to lay down their arms.

"They say the terrorists have now descended into town from the mountains, but these people are our brothers, our own," he said. "We have to come together to resolve the problem."

Ankara refuses to negotiate with the PKK. It has accused the group of orchestrating the riots and charged local politicians with encouraging violence.

Analysts urged Ankara to address the social reasons behind the unrest.

"The youths should be given hope and... the feeling that lack of education, unemployment, begging in the streets and having no future at all is not their destiny," columnist Ismet Berkan wrote in the daily Radikal.