By ROGER COHEN

BERLIN -- For a decade, Kurds have been coming to Germany seeking political asylum, and on
Thursday one of them, Amin Aram, walked into the Kurdish Community Center here, took a tea
from a friend and declared, "Every one of us, without exception, is angry."

A window cleaner, Aram, 31, is one of 210,000 Kurds who have come here since 1989, fleeing various
forms of violence. Unlike Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish rebel leader arrested by Turkish agents on
Monday, he is from Iraq, not Turkey. He says that he is no supporter of Ocalan's Kurdish Workers Party.

Such political divisions have long undermined the scattered Kurds in their battle for a homeland. But for
the overwhelming majority of the estimated 850,000 Kurds now living in Europe, Ocalan's arrest
constitutes a moment when differences are swept away, however fleetingly, by a shared sense of outrage.

"The American government says Ocalan is a terrorist," Aram said. "But my family was called 'terrorists'
by Saddam Hussein just because we are Kurds. Then he killed my mother, three brothers and two sisters
in a chemical-weapons attack on the town of Halabja. Whatever group we are from, we cannot accept
Ocalan's arrest."

Long focused on the problems arising from the fight for new nation-states in the Balkans, European
governments have abruptly awakened this week to another conflict in their midst, one quietly fed over
many years by a fast-growing Kurdish diaspora in Europe, which this week revealed an ability to organize,
communicate and act.

Even as Kurds on Thursday ended a three-day occupation of the Greek Embassy in London and protests
in most places abated, tension remained high.

In Germany, where three Kurds were killed by Israeli security guards on Wednesday as they tried to enter
Israel's Berlin consulate, Kurdish protesters hurled gasoline bombs on Thursday through the windows of a
Turkish cultural center in Heilbronn and attacked visitors with baseball bats. Three people were injured.

Elsewhere, gasoline bombs were thrown at two Turkish travel agencies in the port of Bremen, Germany,
and Kurdish protesters forced their way into the regional U.N. headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

Conversations with Kurds in several European countries suggest that the broad show of defiance this
week reflected developments likely to weigh on the continent for some time: the growing sophistication of
Ocalan's movement, which has waged a separatist war in southeastern Turkey that has left 30,000 dead;
anger stronger than any internal Kurdish differences, and the helter-skelter growth of a Kurdish population
in Europe that had come to represent a large pool of restive national sentiment.

Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on Middle Eastern Affairs at St. Andrew University in Scotland, said, "The
arrest of Ocalan has united the Kurdish nation."

He added: "What European governments do not see is that in many ways the Kurdish struggle reflects the
early days of the Palestinian struggle: putting an issue on the international agenda through terrorism. The
situation could become more and more inflamed."

In Greece on Thursday the ministers of foreign affairs, the interior and public order resigned as public
criticism raged over the country's role in the arrest of Ocalan. And Kenya, where Ocalan was seized after
leaving the Greek Embassy in Nairobi, also reshuffled its cabinet.

The arrest followed several months of detention and flight in Italy, Russia, Greece and elsewhere -- a
fugitive existence for Ocalan that, it now seems, provided a kind of slow-motion prologue to the current
drama, fueling the Kurds' anger and sense of abandonment.

"I tried to warn Western governments this would happen," said Kendal Nezan, the chairman of the
moderate Kurdish Institute of Paris, which opposes the guerrilla tactics of Ocalan's followers. "I said,
'Give Ocalan asylum in exchange for a formal renunciation of violence.' But the Italian government told me
there was too much diplomatic pressure from America and too much economic pressure from Turkey."

The United States has defined the Kurdish Workers Party as a terrorist organization and in recent months
has persistently expressed quiet support for Ocalan's arrest and his handover to Turkey, which is a critical
NATO ally and an important base for U.S. air patrols over Iraq.

Nezan suggested that an effect of U.S. policy and European governments' acquiescence to it had been to
drive moderate Kurds toward sympathy for Ocalan's violent movement. Kurds, he added, had become
convinced that the strategic importance of Turkey to the United States was such that no Kurdish claims
would ever be recognized, let alone backed, in Washington.

"Of the 850,000 Kurds in the European Union, probably 10 percent are in Ocalan's movement, and some
are very militant," he said. "But a lot of people don't like his methods at all. Still, in the end they are led to
feel sympathy because they are so revolted by Western policies."

More than 20 million Kurds live in an area that sprawls across southeastern Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
Of these, perhaps 10 million live in Turkey, where they had been promised a homeland in the 1920 Treaty
of Sevres after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But plans for a Kurdish homeland were dashed when
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk fought to regain the land.

In Turkey, Kurds are not recognized as a minority, a status that would allow them to educate their
children in their own language. A ban imposed by Turkey's last military government on the use of the
Kurdish language in unofficial settings was lifted in 1991, but Kurdish remains illegal in broadcasts or in
educational or political settings, and there is a campaign under way to ban Turkey's main pro-Kurdish
party.

Turks and Kurds have exchanged atrocities in recent years as Turkey tries to eradicate any Kurdish drive
for autonomy or independence.

Faced by the explosive complexity of recognizing any Kurdish claims, the frequent ruthlessness of
Ocalan's methods and the importance of Turkey as a NATO ally, Western governments have generally
preferred to look the other way, accepting Kurdish refugees as a bearable price.

Nowhere has that stream of refugees been more intense than in Germany, which has Europe's most liberal
asylum laws. Indeed, with more than 2 million Turks and about 500,000 Kurds now in the country, the
potential for further violence here is evident.

Ciwan Bahoz, a member of the Kurdish Association for Culture and Mutual Support, said that, like most
Kurds in Germany, he rejected Ocalan's violent methods. But at the same time he felt enraged by the way
Ocalan was treated.

"Although I reject force, I somehow understand what the protesters feel," he said. "Ocalan has been
humiliated. Europe now has to understand that if it does not want Kurdish problems settled on its streets,
it must see that its NATO partner, Turkey, complies with rules that govern any democratic country."

Like several other Kurds, Bahoz said it would have been far better if Germany had agreed to try Ocalan,
because at least he would have been assured a fair trial. The German government declined to request his
extradition from Italy to face various charges because of fear of the potentially explosive domestic
consequences.

German officials said that the influence of the Kurdish Workers Party had clearly been growing and that
many of the cultural and other associations in this country were merely fronts for the organization. Fund
raising -- involving pressure on Kurdish stores and businesses -- was brisk and efficient, they said.

"The Workers Party was once quite marginal," said Barbara John, Berlin's commissioner for the affairs of
foreigners. "But the various Kurdish associations have gradually been drawn toward it. I would not say the
party is the mainstream, but it is now the undisputed representative of the fight for autonomy."

She added that by being extremely naive in its policies toward asylum seekers and by failing to recognize
that the admission of hundreds of thousands of Kurds would inevitably have consequences, Germany now
finds itself in a very delicate situation in which "the question of immigration and foreigners could become
really poisonous."

Apparently aware of this danger of a backlash, Kurdish community leaders throughout Europe appealed on
Thursday for calm. "We appeal to our compatriots to behave in a level-headed way," said a statement from
the Kurdish Community in Berlin.

It is clear, however, that if level-headedness was not conspicuous in recent days, it was not merely
because of spontaneous anger. Faruk Sarhat, a Paris-based member of Ocalan's movement, said the
party's central committee had the means to quickly contact party cells and Kurdish cultural organizations
throughout the continent.

"Our central committee said protests should be democratic, but Ocalan is more than our party," said
Sarhat, who described himself as a member of the Kurdish Workers Party although he formally represents
a front organization called the Kurdistan National Liberation Front. "The kind of anger his arrest generated
cannot be controlled, especially when the role of the Israelis and Americans was so clear."

Like many Kurds, Sarhat argued that Turkey does not have the resources to swoop on Ocalan and arrest
him in the heart of Africa without assistance from other intelligence services. On Wednesday, the Israeli
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, adamantly denied any Israeli role in Ocalan's capture. The denial by
the United States was less vehement.

Whatever the resources of Turkey, those of Kurdish groups in Europe are clearly considerable, including a
Kurdish-language satellite television channel based in London that appears to have played an important role
in spreading the word of Ocalan's arrest.

"The party is very active in the diaspora extracting money from Kurds, and the evidence of drug
trafficking is also persuasive," said Ranstorp, the expert on Middle Eastern affairs. "It is a sophisticated,
organized guerrilla organization."

Evidence of Ocalan's personal influence was clear this week in the attempts at self-immolation by several
protesters. Like Ho Chi Minh, of whom he is a great admirer, Ocalan likes to be called "Uncle" ("Apo" in
Kurdish), and he frequently called his followers' attention to the Vietnamese use of immolation as a method
of protest, Nezan said.

But at the time of his arrest, several Kurdish officials said, he appeared to have been casting around for
some kind of political or diplomatic way out of the cycle of violence. Any possibility of this now appears
to have been dashed, especially if Ocalan's trial in Turkey should end in a death sentence -- an explosive
possibility for a Europe full of disgruntled Kurds.

"I do not support the methods of the Kurdish Workers Party," said Kader Al-Yousef, a Kurdish technician
in Berlin who came to Germany as a student 24 years ago from Syria. "But I cannot condemn its objective
when all it does is fight for our right to a homeland."