Word: southeast
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The AKP had expected to exceed the 46% it gained in the 2007 parliamentary election. But it won just 39% support and fared particularly poorly in the Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey, where Erdogan had campaigned most fiercely. The AKP used to do well in the southeast, but that was when it focused on delivering real improvements in political and cultural rights and economic conditions (often driven by the E.U. accession process) rather than brandishing nationalist slogans...
...Kurds are believed to be buried. The ruling represents something of a revolution in a country that has long oppressed Kurdish rights. "It would have been unthinkable, up until recently, for a solo prosecutor to order this search," says Umit Kardas, a former military judge who served in the southeast in the 1980s. "This gives me hope about Turkey's future...
...military presence in the mainly Kurdish southeast remains strong and the only Kurdish party in parliament constantly worries it will be forced to disband. But in other ways, change is 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...
...first time a coup plot has landed high-ranking military officials in court. The 40 soldiers now being held include a retired general and colonel believed to have cofounded JITEM, a secretive military-intelligence unit which many Kurds suspect is responsible for most of the dirty work in the southeast, including the extrajudicial killings of dozens of Kurdish activists. The Ergenekon trial - the group named itself after a mythic central Asian valley Turks believe they come from - "is a milestone," says Nuserivan Elci, who represents some 50 families of the 'missing' in Silopi. "It's a historic opportunity for Turkey...
...mountains of northern Iraq. Turkish officials seem to recognize this. A trilateral commission of Iraqi Kurd, Turkish and U.S. officials meets regularly to discuss a possible PKK amnesty. Other measures on the agenda in Ankara include restoring Kurdish place-names and cleaning up the jingoistic billboards that litter the southeast. What's really needed is a more democratic constitution. But the government has backtracked on that promise before, and is weakened after losing support in local elections last month. "To make this sense of progress stick, we need Kurdish identity to be constitutionally recognized," says lawyer Elci. "Otherwise it will...