Turkish police arrested some eighty people in Ankara on Tuesday during security checks ahead of a demonstration protesting US Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Turkey later in the day, the Anatolia news agency reported, according to AFP.
Around 1,000 police officers, backed by armored vehicles, were deployed in a park in the Turkish capital's downtown Kizilay district early Tuesday on a tip-off there would be an anti-US demonstration, the report said.
Officers detained some 80 people while checking identification cards of passers-by, Anatolia added.
The planned demonstration, by several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and minor parties, took place in a nearby square, with the protestors denouncing the United States for planning military action against Iraq and trying to draw Turkey into the operation.
"The United States is planning to do in Iraq what it did in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories," said a press statement by the protestors. "It is trying to turn Turkey into the hit-man of imperialism in the Middle East."
Meanwhile, a second demonstration came in the southern province of Adana, which is host to a joint force of US and British planes patrolling a no-fly zone in the north of Iraq, Anatolia reported. "Turkey cannot be an accomplice to US massacres. Warplanes based here will pelt the Iraqi people with bombs. We cannot be spectators to this," read a press statement by the protesting university students.
Warplanes at the Incirlik airbase in Adana took part in bombing raids on Baghdad during the Gulf War in 1991.
Turkey fears turmoil in Iraq would set back its efforts to revive the crisis-hit Turkish economy and lead to the emergence of an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, which has been outside Baghdad's control since the 1991 Gulf War, AFP added.
Such a state might fan separatist sentiment among Turkey's own Kurds and rekindle a 15-year Kurdish rebellion for self-rule in the country's southeastern corner, which has notably faded since 1999. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
