ISTANBUL, 16 February 2005 — Kurdish protesters clashed with Turkish riot police yesterday in demonstrations across the country to mark the sixth anniversary of the capture of rebel commander Abdullah Ocalan. Police sprayed tear gas to break up a crowd of some 200 who gathered in a main pedestrian street in Istanbul, striking out with batons at some of the fleeing demonstrators. It was not clear how many people were injured or detained.

Turkish Special Forces brought Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Ocalan back to Turkey from Kenya in 1999 after a three-month chase around Europe and Africa. He is currently serving a life sentence in a Turkish jail. Reports at the time said Ocalan had been holed up for 12 days in a Greek diplomatic building in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

A few of the protesters in Istanbul left a black wreath outside the Greek Consulate, bearing the inscription: “We condemn the Feb. 15 conspiracy”. Police backed by armored vehicles also used tear gas and batons to disperse around 700 people holding a similar protest in Diyarbakir, the main city in the largely Kurdish southeast. The protesters responded by throwing stones at the police.

Some 10 police officers were injured and around 40 people were detained in Diyarbakir. There were also protests in the cities of Izmir, Mersin and Van.

“End the isolation,” read banners held by a crowd of some 300 activists, referring to Ocalan’s solitary confinement on a prison island in northwestern Turkey. Kurdish activists have long been calling for Ocalan’s transfer to an ordinary jail, but their appeals have so far fallen on deaf ears in Ankara.

Before his capture, Ocalan had been searching for a safe haven. Syria threw him out of Damascus under Turkish pressure in November 1998. He failed to find long-term refuge in Italy, Russia, the Netherlands and other European countries. He was sentenced to death for high treason on June 29, 1999, but the verdict was commuted to life imprisonment. He renounced his armed struggle after his arrest and is currently in solitary confinement on the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul.

The PKK launched its fight for an ethnic homeland in eastern Turkey in 1984. More than 30,000 people, mainly Kurds, have died in the subsequent two decades of conflict but the fighting dwindled after Ocalan’s capture. The group called off a unilateral cease-fire last June, triggering a revival of violence.

Meanwhile, a Turkish businessmen kidnapped two months ago was free yesterday after presenting himself to British soldiers at a base in southern Iraq, said the Turkish Foreign Ministry in Ankara. Kahraman Sadikoglu was flown to Baghdad after appearing at a British base in Basra during the night. It was unknown whether a ransom was paid.

Sadikoglu was kidnapped in Basra, where he had been working under a U.N. contract to clear offshore waters of sunken ships. In northern Iraq, insurgents fired four mortar rounds at a US base near the city of Samarra, killing one US soldier and wounding another, said military authorities in Tikrit.

The joint information centre also said two Iraqi civilians had been killed in northern Iraq, adding all the incidents occurred within the past 24 hours. The bodies of four US soldiers were recovered from a river north of Baghdad after their vehicle crashed Monday near the city of Balad, said an Iraqi army source. The vehicle was pulled from the Ishaqi River at a spot about 100 kilometers from Baghdad.

In another development, a Council of Europe panel said yesterday Turkey has made some legislative progress in protecting the rights of Kurds and other minorities but lags well behind in applying those laws. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance said in a report that Turkey — which last December won approval to start long-term accession talks with the European Union — continues to have “some gaps in the constitution and in criminal, civil and administrative law as regards action against racism and racial discrimination.”