Kurds Demonstrate In Berlin Marchers Follow Coffin Of Woman Hunger Striker

Chanting “Freedom for Kurdistan,” about 8,000 Kurds marched through Berlin on Tuesday behind the coffin of a woman who died during a hunger strike in support of Kurds imprisoned in Turkey.

Police said 11 people were arrested in fringe clashes, though the march was generally peaceful.

Authorities said at first the marchers numbered about 20,000 but later lowered the estimate to about 8,000.

Heightened Kurdish militancy brought warnings from politicians against violence spilling into Germany from the ethnic conflict in Turkey, where Kurdish activists are fighting for an independent Kurdish state in the southeast of the country.

A Berlin conservative, Heinrich Lummer of the Christian Democratic Union party, said Germany could become a “multi-conflict society” if immigration isn’t reduced.

Leftist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Frankfurt city adviser on multicultural affairs, blamed Kurdish militants for at least part of a wave of fire bombings of Turkish businesses in Germany.

Germany “is not Kurdistan,” Cohn-Bendit said, accusing whoever carried out such attacks of bearing the same guilt as German neo-Nazis who killed Turks in fire bombings in recent years.

Some 2,000 policemen on the streets appeared to avoid conflicts with the crowd, which marched from the Kreuzberg district to the center of western Berlin behind the hearse carrying the coffin of Gulnaz Baghistani. No incidents were reported.

Baghistani, 41, a native of Iraq, died of heart failure Thursday during a demonstration after fasting for eight days. The mother of five daughters is to be buried today in Osnabrueck, in western German.

About 60 hunger strikers took part in the protest march.

The Berlin hunger strike, in its 13th day, was in solidarity with some 5,000 Kurdish and Turkish prisoners fasting for 19 days in Turkey.