The unrest erupted when celebrations marking March 21, Newroz day, or the Kurdish new year, degenerated into demonstrations in favour of the armed separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara lists as a terrorist group.

Newroz festivities held on Friday were largely peaceful, but demonstrators took to the streets again on Saturday, chanting slogans in favour of the PKK and its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Tensions were high in the eastern city of Van, where riot police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse a crowd of some 1,500 people, who set bonfires and barricades in the streets and broke the windows of shops and government buildings, reports said.

Footage on the NTV news channel showed officers hitting several protestors with batons and armoured vehicles spraying pressurised water on the crowd.

Young men, hiding their faces behind cloths wrapped around their heads, were seen hurling stones at the police, who took cover behind plastic shields.

About 60 people, among them policemen, were injured and scores of protestors detained, Anatolia news agency reported.

Two parliament members from the Kurdish Democratic Society Party were among the crowd, which took to the streets in defiance of a decision by Van authorities to allow Newroz festivities only on Friday.

Several people were taken into custody in similar unrest in Hakkari, near the border with Iraq, Anatolia said.

Another 16 people were detained late Friday in Viransehir, also in the southeast, after a Newroz celebration was followed by a pro-PKK march that saw protestors hurling Molotov cocktails at the police, Anatolia said, adding that nine officers were injured.

There was unrest also in cities in western Turkey, which are home to sizeable Kurdish immigrant communities from the southeast.

In Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast, 10 people were detained after demonstrators burnt tyres in the streets, hurled stones at the police and broke shop windows, the agency said.

Another 18 people were apprehended in the Aegean city of Izmir in a two-day security sweep that resulted in the seizure of petrol bombs the suspects allegedly planned to use in Newroz protests, it said.

Newroz is a traditional platform for Turkey's Kurds to demonstrate support for the PKK and demand broader rights. About 50 people were killed during Newroz clashes in 1992.

The PKK toop up arms for self-rule in the Kurdish-majority southeast in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed more than 37,000 lives.