Kurds in Turkey gathered on Wednesday to celebrate Newroz, the Kurdish spring festival, during a period of heightened tensions between the Turkish government and the country’s Kurdish political movement.

As celebrations progressed in Diyarbakır, the crowds reportedly forced their way past police barricades and on to the stage, prompting the riot squad to ready for intervention. A large number have reportedly been detained, including journalists, after a minor scuffle.

The opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which became the first pro-Kurdish political party able to pass the 10 percent electoral threshold and gain parliamentary representation in 2015, has suffered heavily under the ongoing state of emergency, in place since after the failed July 2016 coup attempt.

However, Kurdish political groups and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had already been at odds after the breakdown in 2015 of the peace process between the state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which resumed its decades-old insurgency that year, sparking fighting in Turkey’s southeastern region.

The clampdown has seen the number of HDP deputies ejected from parliament rise to double figures, with key figures including former party co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş imprisoned. Dozens of local municipalities controlled by the HDP-affiliated Democratic Regions Party (DBP) have also been taken under “trusteeship” by the government, which switched the elected administrators with its own choice of replacements.

Thus the celebrations in Diyarbakır, known as the capital city of Turkish Kurdistan, went ahead this year under heightened security and with a markedly politicised atmosphere, guarded by thousands of police and observed by a police helicopter flying overhead.

Many thousands joined celebrations in the city, known in Kurdish as Amed, including HDP co-chair Pervin Buldan heading of a contingent from her party, and international representatives from Europe and Iraqi Kurdistan.