Violence rocks Europe
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Berlin has seen ethnic violence between Turks and Kurds in recent weeks that echo the renewed tensions between the two groups along the border of Iraq and Turkey. Germany has a massive immigrant population with origins in Turkey, estimated at 2.4 million. Of that number, about 500,000 are ethnic Kurds, members of an ancient Indo-European-speaking group with populations spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. The West has seen a growing population of refugee and immigrant Kurds, with Berlin alone said to be home to an estimated 60,000.
The Turks have long repressed their Kurdish population, going so far as to deny their very existence and calling them “mountain Turks.” The Kurdish language was long banned for public use while Ankara has carried out a decades-long brutal war against the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey claims is being sponsored by the semi-autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. Turkey has responded to a recent drive to condemn Turkey’s genocide of Christian Armenians by stepping up its camapign against its own Kurds, which has been met with protests across the Kurdish diaspora, especially in Germany.
As a result, clashes between immigrant Kurdish separatists and Turkish nationalists have broken out across the German capital and led to fears of worse violence to come. In late October members of the paramilitary Grey Wolves, a Turkish supremacist group that has carried out violence in the Balkans and Cyprus against Europeans, attacked Kurds in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, surrounding a Kurdish “cultural center.” Eighteen German cops were injured in the ensuing ethnic violence, and over a dozen people were arrested. Apparently German “anarchists” also were involved.German government sources, touchy on the point of immigration, seemed confused. Berlin top cop Claudia Schmid said that “the conflict in the border region with Iraq has already spilled over into Berlin. We have to be careful and look the problem straight in the eye.” The police union, whose members were hospitalized by the show of multicultural “enrichment,” were a little more blunt. Said a spokesman, “People running in a mob with machetes through Kreuzberg, injuring police, must be made to feel the full force of the democratic state.”