Word: diyarbakir
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...happening. After years under a ban, the Kurdish language is flowering, the result of European Union-mandated reforms introduced in 2006. In Silopi, the same store that once secretly sold bootleg Kurdish tapes is now plastered with pictures of budding Kurdish stars. Language courses in the unofficial regional capital Diyarbakir are packed, writers' groups have sprouted and at the local theater, young actors are staging the city's first ever original Kurdish-language play (The Mutes). "Diyarbakir used to be a place where Kurdish was spoken, but never written," says municipal cultural coordinator Cevahir Sadak Duzgan. "That's changing...
Izzettin Aslan, a retired civil servant, knows how elusive justice can be. In 1993, his son Murat, a 24-year-old university student in Diyarbakir, stepped out to pay an electricity bill. According to witnesses, four men grabbed Murat off a busy street in broad daylight and pushed him into a waiting car. "It was as if the ground opened up and swallowed him," Aslan says...
...parliament and flag. For the first time in history, the Kurds - an ancient people spread out across Iran, Syria, Turkey and Iraq - have what looks like a state. "The emergence of Kurdistan has fostered a sense of self-confidence here," says Sezgin Tanrikulu, a prominent lawyer in Diyarbakir. "Not because people want independence. Or to live there. But it shows that there is indeed a distinct Kurdish culture. For a long time we were told 'you don't exist', 'there's no such thing as a Kurd,' and yet, look, there they...
...have died, although the total number of actual suicides is impossible to document. "Women are locked away in a room with a rope and put under pressure. Or they might be forced to take rat poison," says Nebahat Akkoc, founder of Ka-Mer, a women's rights group in Diyarbakir, the regional capital of the south-east. Last week the U.N. sent Yakin Ertürk, rapporteur on violence against women, on a fact-finding mission to investigate the suicides. Some 70 women die in honor killings in Turkey every year, mostly in the southeast, women's groups...
...government has lost its focus," says Cengiz Aktar, a political scientist at Galatasaray University. The result is an increasingly divided society and, in Turkey's volatile southeast where most Kurds live, a greater number of abuses by the authorities, claims Selahattin Demirtas of the Human Rights Association in Diyarbakir. "The verdict by the European Court on Ocalan only reinforces the idea [in Turkish minds] that Kurds are to blame," he says. E.U. officials monitoring Turkey's pro-gress toward accession talks say the recent problems are no reason to push the panic button - yet. Once talks start, "we will have...