Kurds in Germany slam Turkey’s crackdown on Kurdish community
Thousands of Kurds in Germany have held a demonstration against the ongoing crackdown by the Turkish government on the Kurdish population in Turkey.
Local police in Dusseldorf said on Saturday that about 15,000 people marched near the parliament of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, demanding a halt to Turkey’s ongoing security crackdown on Kurdish-dominated regions southeast of the country.
A police spokesman said the turnout in the event was double the figures expected by the organizers, adding that despite being challenged by the locals who criticized the noise on a public holiday, the demonstration was peaceful.
Ankara has been engaged in a large-scale campaign against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, in its southern border region in the recent past, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledging that his government will do its utmost to root out the PKK elements in the area.
State media say more than 200 members of the PKK have been killed in various operations launched over the past days. Figures provided by the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) show at least 24 civilians have been killed in the fighting.
Turkey and the PKK have been engaged in three decades of conflict. A two-year ceasefire collapsed in July after Turkey launched attacks on the positions of the group in northern Iraq.
Photographs of the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in jail since 1999, were carried during the demonstration, a first such incident in Germany in years.
The demonstrators in Dusseldorf, mostly members of Germany’s federation of Kurdish groups, Nav-Dem, also slammed the European Union for clinching a deal with Ankara on the issue of refugees. Turkey has agreed to stem the flow of refugees going from the country to the European states in return for receiving at least three million euros in financial assistance from the EU.
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