15,000 European Kurds protest for leader’s release
STRASBOURG, France: Some 15,000 people marched in the eastern French city of Strasbourg on Saturday demanding that Turkey release Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, as Europe’s Kurds held their biggest annual gathering.
Organisers estimated that between 15,000 and 17,000 people, many arriving by coach or train from Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, joined the rally. A local police official put the numbers at 12,000 to 15,000.
Ocalan, leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been detained on a prison island off Istanbul’s coast since 1999.
Mirtaza, a 60-year-old protester who travelled from Nancy in eastern France for the demonstration, said Strasbourg – the capital of a region once disputed by France and Germany but now the headquarters of several European institutions – was a symbolic choice of venue.
“Strasbourg is the centre of Europe – the city of the Council of Europe, the European parliament, the European Court of Human Rights,” she told AFP.
Turkey’s consul general in Strasbourg had unsuccessfully demanded a ban on the protest, as Ankara – along with the United States and European Union – views the PKK as a terrorist organisation. More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 demanding an independent state for Kurds.
Since then the group has narrowed its demands to greater autonomy and cultural rights.
Saturday’s march, an annual event, took place under high security, with trucks blocking the entrances to streets leading to the protest route – a method used in France since the attack in the southern city of Nice in July, when a jihadist rammed a lorry into a crowd of Bastille Day revellers, killing 86.
Meanwhile in the southern French city of Marseille 900 Kurdish protesters marched peacefully through the streets. — AFP BOGOTA: President Juan Manuel Santos spoke with US President Donald Trump on the phone Saturday and asked him to support Colombia’s peace plan with FARC rebels, the Latin American leader said on Twitter.
Santos, in a series of posts, described their conversation as ‘productive.’
“@POTUS expressed his support for peace and desire to maintain the best relations with Colombia,” Santos said, referring to Trump by his Twitter handle.
He said he asked Trump to support approval of the Colombia peace plan in the US Congress.
“(Trump) said he was very interested and would take charge of it personally,” said Santos, who added that Trump extended an invitation for him to visit the White House.
The call lasted about 25 minutes, Santos’s office said.
The United States has pledged US$450 million to support implementation of the peace agreement signed in November between Bogota and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), bringing an end to a 52-year conflict.— AFP