Long-forgotten, ignored and oppressed in their corner of southeast Anatolia, Turkey's 13 million plus Kurds impatiently await the country's entry into the EU to lay to rest their turbulent and often tragic past.
The situation today is a far cry from just 10 years ago when, in the heat of a separatist uprising by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Turkish officialdom still chose to largely ignore any Kurdish identity in this country.
As part of its efforts to join the EU and live up to the bloc's standards on minority rights, Ankara over the past couple of years broke decades-old taboos with Kurdish-language broadcasts on state radio and television and the creation of private schools -- packed with students -- that teach Kurdish.
EUROPEAN DREAMS
"It's a pity all this didn't happen earlier. People have better feelings now, they are less negative," said Kurdish instructor Ibrahim Halil Tas, 35, in Diyarbakir, the main metropolis of Turkey's largely poor, Kurdish-majority southeast, where mere mention of the EU brings smiles to people's faces.
"I dream of a Turkey that belongs to Europe -- we have no reason to envy the Europeans," said Mehmet Senocak, 19, a student who faces an uncertain future in this region where unemployment is way above the national average.
Joining the EU may be "painful" at times, Senocak said, but will, in the long run, benefit his people after years of frustration.
The Kurds fought alongside Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, during the country's war of Independence between 1919 and 1923.
REBELLIONS
But their later rebellions against the central authority -- most notably in 1925 and 1937 -- always ended in blood and tears.
Most Kurds are completely integrated in Turkish society and have rarely been victims of individual acts of racism and oppression, but have always sought to preserve their ethnic identity -- that was where the problems began.
For decades, the authorities in Ankara refused to grant them any rights, going so far as to deny their very existence, saying in the nationalistic 1970s that "There are no Kurds -- only mountain Turks."
This may have been one of the reasons why, in 1984, Kurdish nationalism erupted in the form of the PKK, a group considered to be terrorist by Turkey and many European countries and international organizations.
Under its founder Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK waged a ruthless battle for an independent state in the southeast, which they called "Turkish Kurdistan."
The "low intensity civil war," as one ranking Turkish officer then termed it, spread to the entire region and claimed nearly 37,000 lives before it abruptly ended with Ocalan's capture in Kenya in 1999, followed by a trial that saw him sentenced first to death, then to life imprisonment.
The PKK changed names a few times since and its latest incarnation, the Kurdish Peoples' Congress -- or KONGRA GEL -- announced in June that it was putting an end to the unilateral ceasefire it proclaimed shortly after Ocalan's arrest.
Sporadic fighting has resumed since, but with far less intensity than before as Turkey's European aspirations seem at last to have broken the vicious circle of violence and revenge.
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