The Foreign Affairs Department of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party issued a press release on their sit-down strike in Diyarbakır, a Kurdish-majority city in south-eastern Turkey.

As we saw with the recent Nevruz incidents, there is tremendous tension in southeastern Turkey that is just waiting for the right time to be exploited. Any solution to the Kurdish question seems to be far away right now. My intention in this piece, though, is not a lengthy analysis of the Kurdish question, nor to explain the obstacles, which are so obviously numerous.

Seventy people were detained Thursday following a civil disobedience action led by Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party in the southeastern city of Batman.

Trials against Kurdish politicians Aysel Tuğluk and Ahmet Türk, Co-Chairs of the Democratic Society Congress, are still pending in Ankara and Diyarbakır. Tuğluk is facing 70 years behind bars in the Diyarbakır trial and another five years from the Ankara procedures.

TÜBİTAK eventually issued a report on the footage of a bank’s security camera that supposedly captured the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalists Hrant Dink. Plaintiff lawyer Halavurt described the report as “contradictory” and “incomprehensible”.

The new U.S. envoy to Ankara queried Turkey?s main opposition about freedom of the press in the country during a Monday meeting, according to the party?s leader.