Tens of thousands of people gathered Thursday in the city of Diyarbakir, southern Turkey, to mourn the deaths of three Kurdish activists murdered in Paris last week, an outpouring that some said was the largest political gathering that Turkish authorities had ever allowed the Kurds to stage.
Fidan Dogan, Leyla Söylemez and Sakine Cansız, one of the founders of the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), were killed by execution-style shootings last week.
Their three coffins, draped in red, green and yellow flags of the PKK, were carried in procession to the main square, as a massive crowd chanted: “The martyrs’ path is our path”
See reports and photographs by the New York Times and The Independent.
None of the Turkish television networks carried the event live. The footage above is from the MCI TV portal.
It is suggested the killings may have been an attempt to derail the recently begun peace talks between Ankara and PKK after three decades of conflict.
While Turkish government officials suggested the killings might be linked to an internal conflict in the PKK, some Kurdish political activists blame what they call the Turkish “deep state,” a nationalist underground network that was behind hundreds of extrajudicial assaults against Kurds in the 1990s and considers any ethnicity a threat to Turkey’s national unity.
