War memories haunt Turkey's Kurds

"Some villagers don't want to sign this so they don't go back," says Mustafa Karahan, the local chairman of DEHAP, a Kurdish political party that a Turkish state court moved to close down last month. "I saw this letter, but I wouldn't sign it because it's not true. The state burned down our village, and I won't say otherwise."

Exhaustion hangs in the gray air and in the eerie, empty spaces left behind by families who fled to Turkey's big cities or Europe.

Only about 20 of the village's 80 original homes have come to life again. Few here express a keenness to see a renewal in fighting between Turks and Kurds. But the flip side of their fears of new tensions is a hope that Iraq's war will lead to a Kurdish state - the very thing the Turkish establishment fears most.

"I think all the people will be happy after the war if there is a Kurdish state," says Teyfik Ates, Cahit's older cousin. "The people of southeastern Turkey, they will want their freedom, too. Maybe the people will strive for a Kurdish state here. Not with weapons, but with their minds."

Or with a song. It is close to midnight at a subterranean nightclub, where a live band is playing songs in Turkish - and an occasional one in Kurdish.

When they do, smiles appear. A young Kurdish journalist whispers: "You could still get in trouble for this."

Mr. Farqin, a famous Kurdish singer, says his band Koma Azad - "the Freedom Group" - is regularly banned from holding concerts. Turkish police, Farqin complains, incorrectly translate their lyrics to make them sound radical.

When he sings lines about feeling that he's in a prison because he misses a lover, it is interpreted as longing for the armed struggle for independence from Turkey.

"They want to sabotage the peace situation," says the handsome singer, dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck sweater during an interview at the Tigris and Euphrates Art and Cultural Center, a new hangout for Kurdish artists.

The center's director, Giyasettin Sehir, agrees. "Our idea of peace means that we can speak our language and have our cultural identity," he says. "Their idea of peace is for us to be silent, to refuse our history, to think like Turks, read like Turks, act like Turks."

Just last August the Turkish parliament allowed Kurdish to be broadcast for a few hours a week, and said the Kurdish language would be permitted to be taught. In practice, neither decision has been fully implemented.

Both were specifically geared toward meeting requirements for joining the European Union - a goal that has been floating further away from Turkey.

Crystalizing differences, the European human rights court ruled last month that Mr. Ocalan, the PKK leader, had not received a fair trial.

The next day, Turkey closed down HADEP, a party Turkey accuses of having connections with the PKK, and started proceedings to close DEHAP, which essentially has the same membership.

Party members think it was a way of discouraging Turkish Kurds from even thinking about following in the footsteps of their fellow Kurds in Iraq. Others warn it could backfire, taking away chances for expression and forcing Kurds to look for other alternatives.

"It was the beginning of a relaxed situation. Then the war discussions started and things changed," says Selahattin Demirtas, the chairman of the Human Rights Association of Diyarbakir.

"If the people don't have the ability to use their democratic rights, then they can go to the mountains," he says. It is a phrase, in these parts, that is a euphemism for fighting.

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