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Turkey's Guernica

The Turkish military's attack on the Kurdish town of Uludere (Roboski in Turkish), in which 34 children were killed, evokes memories of the Spanish attack on the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, writes Cengiz Candar.
Relatives holding pictures and belongings of air strike victims mourn during a funeral ceremony in Gulyazi near the southeastern Turkish town of Uludere, in the Sirnak province, December 30, 2011. Turkish rights groups called on Friday for a U.N.-sponsored investigation after Turkish warplanes killed 35 villagers in an airstrike targeting Kurdish rebels on the Iraqi border that the government has called an operational mistake. REUTERS/Stringer (TURKEY - Tags: CIVIL UNREST DISASTER)
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Just as Guernica was a symbol of the Spanish civil war, Roboski (Turkish Uludere) is bound to become a symbol of Turkey’s Kurdish problem.

Guernica was a small village in the Basque region of Spain. On April 26,1937, it was bombed by Franco’s forces in the Spanish civil war. Hundreds of innocent people were killed. What made Guernica unforgettable was no doubt Pablo Picasso’s timeless painting inspired by that event.

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