More deaths sought

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By Andrew Hornung nta PROSECUTORS representing Turkey's ruling military junta are demanding less than 1,850 death sentences in a series of mass show trials of political opponents of the regime.

Last week saw demands for death sentences for 259 defendants in a mass trial of members of the left wing Dev Yol organisation accused of taking control of the Black Sea town of Fatsa, before the September 1980 Meanwhile another show trial finds 416 people facing demands for prison terms ranging from 5-15 years: they are at present in a military detention • centre in Erzincan.

The ruthless suppression of left wing opposition has been increasingly extended by the Evren junta to include action against the liberal bourgeois opposition party the RPP, led by former Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

Ecevit himself was released from jail last week after 57-day sentence - only to face further allegations that he spoke to foreign journalists in defiance of the junta's restrictions. He could be sentenced to as much as two more years imprisonment.

In a new move against Ecevit's now banned Party, the junta barred 133 RPP MPs from foreign travel -lending further fuel to speculation that a show trial of RPP members could be in the offing.

The horrific conditions and torture faced by the victims of the campaign of institutionalised terror have prompted 2,000 prisoners at Istanbul's Metris jail to go on hunger-strike for the past two weeks.

The Danish government is contemplating possibly taking the Turkish regime to European Court Human Rights.

But the British workers' movement can show its solidarity with Turkish trade unionists and socialists by affiliating to the Turkey Solidarity Campaign, c/o BM Box 5965, London WCIN 3XX.