TURKEY: Breaking with a decades-long state policy of treating Kurdish nationalism as a security issue, Turkey's prime minister yesterday confirmed his determination to find a peaceful solution to the country's thorny relations with its Kurdish minority.
"The Kurdish problem is everybody's problem, but above all mine," Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.
"We believe that the solution to all of Turkey's problems lies in more democracy and more prosperity."
His comments were a reiteration of a statement he made on Wednesday, when he became the first Turkish leader publicly to acknowledge the existence of a "Kurdish problem". The volte-face comes against a backdrop of rising violence in Kurdish southeastern Turkey.
Five years after their 15-year war against the Turkish state petered out, rebels of the former separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have been fighting again since last June.
Over 35,000 people died in the first bout of bloodshed. Well over 100 Turkish soldiers have died in the last 12 months, and the PKK is widely suspected of responsibility for a bomb attack that killed Irish tourist Tara Whelan in mid-July.
Insisting as recently as June that Turkey had "no Kurdish problem, just a terrorist problem", Mr Erdogan's change of tack is believed to be a response to recent complaints by senior generals that the government was not supporting the army in its fight against terrorism.
Its powers reduced by recent EU reforms, the Turkish military has also repeatedly failed to persuade the US to permit cross-border operations against PKK bases in northern Iraq.
Mr Erdogan has so far given no hint of future policy plans. With unemployment in parts of the southeast as high as 70 per cent, and poverty rampant, finding actions to match his words will be a major task. Not least because of the controversy stirred up by his abandonment of dogmas long cherished by the Turkish state.
Understandably, most Kurds reacted positively to his statements. Former MP Leyla Zana, awarded the EU's Sakharov Prize for Peace in 1996 while she was in jail, described them as "brave, necessary, and significant".
For the hawkish defenders of the status quo, though, Mr Erdogan's comments are anathema.
"The prime minister's words are a historical error which mean legalising ethnicity," said the head of Turkey's parliamentary opposition, Deniz Baykal. "Far from uniting, the approach he has taken risks turning Turkey into another Yugoslavia."
Significantly, the PKK itself was also critical of Mr Erdogan's initiative.
A spokesman for the rebels called on Kurds to boycott his trip to Diyarbakir, while Cemal Ucar, a columnist for the pro-PKK daily Gundem, bizarrely claimed the government was "terrified of any reference to Kurdish identity".
Such hostility, say analysts supportive of the government's change of direction, may well indicate a fear on the part of extreme nationalists that a more moderate approach by Ankara could wean many Kurds away from support for violent rebellion.