Last week, shoppers in Copenhagen's pedestrian town center found themselves blocked by a surprise demonstration. About 200 members of Denmark's Kurdish minority had taken to the streets like Kurds all over Europe, to demonstrate against the capture of Kurdish terrorist mastermind Abdullah Ocalan. After occupying the Greek consulate, the Kurds rushed the office of the European Commission, took the employees hostage, and threatened to throw one of them out the window, unless their demands for Mr. Ocalan's release were heard. Now, few things will stop a Danish shopper cold in his tracks, and as it happened most people chose to go about their business unfazed by the danger of flying Eurocrats. Still, it was one of those events that served to cast doubts in the minds of Danes and other Europeans on whether their sympathies ought to be entirely with the Kurdish independence movement.
Defenestration is so, well, unDanish.
Fortunately, police managed to talk the demonstrators into releasing the captives and vacating the building after a few hours so no one got hurt. Not so elsewhere in Copenhagen, where a young girl in a fit of fanatical grief set herself on fire and had to be taken to the hospital in critical condition. The two countries are home to the majority of the 25 million Kurds scattered over Eurasia and the Middle East, a people without a state and unfortunately not with much prospect of getting one either. Turkey, of course, is an important NATO ally, which means that right now, the prospect of conflict between two NATO members, Greece and Turkey, is imminent. At the same time, Turkey is also an aspiring member of the European Union, though that prospect is constantly pushed into the future by Europeans pointing to Turkey's human rights record, particularly in the fight against the PKK and in the political and cultural suppression of Kurdish ethnicity.