| Thousands of people took to the streets of Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast on Saturday in a state-sponsored demonstration against separatist violence. The protesters, mainly state-paid village guards, civil servants and schoolchildren, waved Turkish flags and chanted anti-guerrilla slogans in the remote hillside town of Sirnak, overlooking the Iraqi border some 50 km (30 miles) away. The rally came amid rising speculation about a possible Turkish army incursion into northern Iraq and coincided with a call from the army General Staff in Ankara on Friday for Turks to show a “mass resistance reflex” to PKK attacks. “Damn the PKK”, “Martyrs do not die, the homeland will not be divided,” the crowds chanted below a 10 metre (33 ft) high portrait of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, flanked by similarly large Turkish flags hanging from a state building. |