22 sentenced to hang

Press, 11 August 1980, Page 6

22 sentenced to hang

NZPA-Reuter Adana, ■ , Turkey It was almost a small town on trial and the judgments ranged 'from freedom to death. The trial of 835 residents of the little market town of Kahramanmaras ended almost as abruptly as the political and religious riots that brought bloodshed to its streets 22 months ago. A military judge, scarcely pausing for breath during the final 3| hour session, sentenced 22 townspeople to the gallows and some 400 to prison, and sent the rest back home to freedom in their shops and farms. Thus ended the final chapter of the tragedy of Kahramanmaras, where at least 111 people, mostly minority Alevi Muslims, were slaugh-

tered in three days in December, 1978, by their Sunni Muslim neighbours they had lived and . worked with in peace for as long as anyone could remember. The riots broke out when a cinema was bombed while showing a Left-wing film. The violence and the 14month military trial reflected the volcanic political and religious feelings -which have increasingly erupted in Turkish towns arid cities in the last few years. The indictment alleged that a small number of political extremists had provoked conservative Sunni Muslims r— farmers, shopkeepers, housewives, and even Muslim priests —- to slaughter their minority

Alevi (Shi’ite) Muslim neighbours. :

As -the hundreds of defendants stood to hear their sentences in a stifling indoor basketball arena, if was? hard to believe they were any different from the shopkeepers, peasants, and housewives bustling outside, in southern . Turkish city of Adana.

Judging by the verdicts, many of them were not /

More than 400 of the , defendants — the men in the haggy peasant trousers; typical of south-eastern Turkey arid the women draped in casraf (black robes) or hidden beneath KeadScarves — shuffled one by one into the Mediterranean sunshine and freedom as their verdicts were called.