Some 3,000 officers were on duty in Diyarbakir and police helicopters overflew the city, the largest in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast, as revellers poured into the festival venue.

Newroz Day, which marks the arrival of spring, has become a platform for the Kurdish community to demand greater freedoms and voice support for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody separatist campaign in the southeast.

Some demonstrators brandished posters of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and Kurdish songs praising the PKK blared from loudspeakers as women clad in bright-coloured traditional dresses danced and waved flags in the Kurdish colours of red, yellow and green.

"Democratic solution or democratic resistance," one banner read as hardliners chanted: "Blood for blood, we are with you Ocalan."

Thousands of people were also gathering for a Newroz celebration in Istanbul, home to a large Kurdish migrant community.

In a message issued Saturday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for reconciliation, saying the traditional bonfires lit on Newroz Day should signify "the light of love, friendship and fraternity and not the fire of violence and hatred."

In August, Erdogan's government announced plans to expand Kurdish freedoms in a bid to erode popular support for the PKK and end the conflict, which has claimed some 45,000 lives since the rebels took up arms in 1984.

But the plan faltered in December when seven soldiers were killed in a PKK ambush and the constitutional court outlawed Turkey's main Kurdish party for links to the PKK, sparking deadly Kurdish protests and street violence.

Ankara says it remains committed to its reform pledges, but is yet to take concrete steps.

Two people were killed in Newroz clashes between protestors and police in 2008 after celebrations were banned in several towns.

The bloodiest Newroz was in 1992 when clashes across the southeast claimed about 50 lives.

Erdogan's government has undertaken some measures to ease rampant poverty in the southeast and expand Kurdish cultural freedoms, winning notable popularity among Kurds.

Last year, the state broadcaster inaugurated a Kurdish-language television channel, a milestone in a country where speaking Kurdish was banned until the early 1990s.

Sceptics however argue the conflict cannot be resolved as long as the government rejects dialogue with the PKK, listed as as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community.