CONFLICT-TURKEY: Kurds Protest in Rome

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jorge Pina

ROME, Nov 16 1998 (IPS) - A human wall has been forming around a Rome hospital since Friday in an attempt to prevent the extradition to Turkey of Kurdish pro-independence leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Some 6,000 Kurdish men women and children from Italy, France, the United States and Australia have joined a protest growing day by day, and even through the cold autumn nights when temperatures drop to around 11 degrees.

Many demonstrators started a hunger strike Sunday to put pressure on an Italian government considering both Turkey’s extradition request, and Ocalan’s application for political asylum.

Hunger strikes are also underway in Moscow and Bonn.

The demonstration is taking place opposite the Celio military hospital in Rome, in the central Celimontana square near the Colisseum, but Ocalan himself is believed to be in a hospital in Palestrina, to the south of the Italian capital.

This is the first delicate international situation to be faced by Italy’s new centre left government, led by Massimo D’Alema of the Democratic Left Party (PDS) since late October.

The government is apparently looking kindly on Ocalan’s asylum request. Ocalan is leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – a guerrilla group which has been fighting 15 years for an independent Kurdish State.

Turkey is home to around 12 million Kurds, mostly living in the southeastern part of the country.

Turkey’s government does not accept the PKK demands and has been practising a repressive policy against the pro-independence guerrillas. “Government pressure has decapitated the PKK,” said Turkish prime minister Mesut Yilmaz.

There are a total of around 25 million Kurdish people living in an area on the frontiers of Turkey, Iran, Irak, Syria and Armenia – the biggest stateless ethnic minority in the world, with a culture dating back to 400 AD.

Turkish security forces have been accused of violating human rights in a war which has already caused the death of 30,000 people and forced more than a million to abandon their homes, said activists.

Sources within the Turkish government reported Ocalan had taken refuge in Moscow in mid-October, after leaving Syria, a country which refused to support the PKK.

Ocalan was arrested on Thursday, after entering Italy from Moscow on a false passport in the name of Abdullah Sarikurt. An international warrant had been issued on him by courts in Germany and Turkey.

In a communique presented to the pro-Kurd media in Turkey, the PKK leader said the Italian authorities had been forewarned of his trip to Rome.

Italy’s Justice Minister, Deliberto Oliviero, the new PDS secretary Walter Veltroni, the Greens and the communists all supported Ocalan’s asylum request.

Furthermore, Italian law bans extradition to a country where the death penalty is in force, and this is the case with Turkey.

In order to overcome this hurdle, Turkey’s Justice Ministry presented prime minister Yilmaz with a bill to abolish the death penalty Monday, substituting it with life imprisonment.

Ocalan faces charges for the murder of more than 29,000 people during the 15 years of fighting in Turkey.

Italy’s foreign minister Lamberto Dini, and his Turkish counterpart, Ismail Cem, met in a special session of the Western European Union meeting in Rome Monday called to deal with the Ocalan case.

The Italian government analysed the “legal aspects of international and national law which could be applied to this case,” said a communique from the Foreign Ministry, adding that Cem had “explained the reasoning behind his government’s extradition request.”

Italy also called on the Turkish authorities to do everything in their power to gain the release of Italian citizen Mario Calascibetta, taken hostage by a group of inmates in an Istambul prison Sunday.

The Turkish prisoners are demanding Ocalan be handed over in exchange for Calascibetta, arrested in Turkey on a Swiss warrant for charges of attempted murder. The Italian is due to be handed over to the Swiss authorities this week.