Hundreds of thousands of minority Kurds peacefully celebrated a traditional spring festival in Turkey today, showing greater cultural assertiveness after acquiring new rights.
Revellers sang and danced around bonfires in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish southeast, a region that has long been plagued by separatist violence and unemployment, but has become a battleground for votes in local elections on March 29th.
In the past Newruz, which marks the beginning of the New Year according to the Iranian calendar and is known in Iran as Nowruz, has been marred by violence from supporters of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) guerrilla group.
Turkey's Kurds, who number between 12 and 14 million out of a population of 70 million, have long complained of discrimination. For years their Indo-Iranian language was banned and Newruz was seen as a separatist event.
Under reforms aimed at gaining membership of the European Union for Turkey, the ruling AK Party has given Kurds more cultural and political rights. A Kurdish-language television station has started and the Koran can be published in Kurdish.
Prime minister Tayyip Erdogan has campaigned aggressively in the southeast, an area once ignored by Turkey's mainstream political parties, wresting support away from local pro-Kurdish parties ahead of the local elections.
The Democratic Society Party, which has traditionally dominated politics in the southeast, says the AK Party is playing to ethnic sympathies to gain votes in the poor and troubled region.
Municipality vehicles drove residents of Diyarbakir to the celebrations in the city centre on Saturday amid a heavy security presence.
Despite the lack of violence on Saturday, tensions were high as the Turkish military has stepped up offensives against the PKK within Turkey and against PKK bases in northern Iraq.
Some 40,000 people have died in the conflict since 1984, when the PKK first took up arms to carve out an ethnic Kurdish homeland in southeastern Turkey.
But the government, by paying more attention to the region in the form of investment programmes and employment packages, has raised some hopes that the violence could end.
"You have increasing momentum coming from different sources. It is a very dynamic period. This would be a good year to put the PKK behind us," said a western official.
Earlier this year the government announced a tax cut package that would encourage businesses to move to the relatively underdeveloped eastern part of the country.
Reuters