DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - Dozens of mayors from Turkey's troubled southeast could go to jail for sending a letter to Denmark's prime minister, who said that would go against the values of the EU which Turkey is hoping to join.
A state prosecutor has charged 56 mayors with "knowingly and willingly helping" the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) when they urged Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen not to close the Danish-based Kurdish broadcaster Roj TV.
No date has been set for the trial and the criminal court must still accept the charges for the case to go ahead. The mayors could face up to 10 years in jail.
Turkey accuses Roj of being a mouthpiece of the separatist PKK, which took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 with the aim of carving out an ethnic homeland. More than 30,000 people, mostly Kurds, have been killed in that conflict.
In the letter sent to Rasmussen last December, the mayors of some of the largest cities in the southeast urged him to resist any pressure from Ankara to close down Roj TV, which they said was necessary for democracy in Turkey.
"I am aware that there apparently are problems brewing for some mayors who wrote a letter to me," Rasmussen told a news conference in Brussels, where he was attending an EU summit.
"If this does turn out to be the case, then I think it is a very serious situation for Turkey and it is not something we will quietly accept, because it would be completely contradictory to the principle that has to be met for countries wishing to join the EU," Rasmussen said.
Ankara is under EU pressure improve the cultural rights of its ethnic minorities, especially the 12 million Kurds who until the 1990s were banned from using their language in public.
Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan boycotted a planned news conference last November in Denmark with Rasmussen to protest against the presence of a journalist from Roj TV.
Rasmussen said excluding the correspondent would have violated the EU's principles of freedom of expression.
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