http://www.economist.com/node/14313719

 ON MAY 1st 1920 Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, told the fledgling parliament that “north of Kirkuk there are Kurds as there are Turks, and we never discriminated against them.” Yet for most of the past 80 years those of Turkey’s 14m-odd Kurds who dared publicly to identify themselves as such have been brutally repressed, kicked out of their villages, tortured, jailed or killed.

The Kurds have fought back in rebellion after rebellion. None so violent or so long as that launched in 1984 by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Over 40,000 people, many of them PKK fighters, have died in a terrorist campaign that has cost the state billions of dollars, blotted its international image, and stymied Turkey’s efforts to become a full-fledged democracy.

Successive governments have mumbled about dealing with the Kurdish problem, only to be stopped by Turkey’s hawkish generals. But now a confluence of circumstances is raising hopes of a more lasting solution under the leadership of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has staked his political future on this issue.

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In a ground-breaking speech in parliament earlier this month, Mr Erdogan provoked tears when he spoke of the common pain of Turkish and Kurdish mothers who had lost sons in the conflict. His interior minister, Besir Atalay, has been making the rounds of assorted politicians and civic leaders to build consensus for an as yet unarticulated plan. Mr Erdogan, who has long shunned the largest Kurdish party, the Democratic Society (DTP), for being the PKK’s political front, met its leader, Ahmet Turk, in early August.

The government’s plan is said to include easing remaining bans on Kurdish broadcasting, allowing Turkified villages to regain their Kurdish names, setting up Kurdish language and literature departments in universities and scrapping laws under which thousands of young Kurds are jailed for allegedly acting for the PKK (usually for no more than chanting PKK slogans or throwing stones at police). “This time the government means real business,” concludes Henri Barkey, an American academic who has studied the Kurds.

In the largely Kurdish city of Batman, Mufide Agaya, whose son is among thousands of Kurds who went missing at the height of the conflict in the mid-1990s, agrees. “I now have hope that, dead or alive, I will recover my boy.” Local prosecutors have been unearthing the remains of victims of the once rampant “mystery murders” carried out by rogue members of the security forces. In Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of the Kurdish region, where prison inmates were once force-fed their own excrement, banners reading “Qirej Nekin” (Kurdish for “don’t litter”) line the streets. Once officials would have been jailed just for putting them up.

The trickiest part of Mr Erdogan’s “Kurdish overture” is how to get the PKK to stop fighting without negotiating with their imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who continues to hold sway over both his men and millions of ordinary Kurds. The main opposition parties have already blasted Mr Erdogan for alleged treason. The obvious way out would be to use the DTP as a proxy, rather as Britain used Sinn Fein to deal with the IRA. The trouble is that the notoriously egocentric Mr Ocalan cannot bear to remain out of the limelight. He now says he will unveil his own road map for peace. Although recent opinion polls show 45% of Turks supporting Mr Erdogan’s Kurdish overture, a deal that followed overt bargaining with the PKK would be tricky to sell at home.

At least this time the army is behind the government. The chief of the general staff, Ilker Basbug, has grumbled about undermining the “unitary state” and injecting ethnicity into the constitution. But a string of leaks about attempted coups and botched operations against the PKK have dented the generals’ image. Many of those most likely to torpedo a Kurdish deal are being prosecuted in the Ergenekon case against an alleged network of anti-government plotters. General Basbug has long conceded that military means alone cannot solve the Kurdish problem.

The withdrawal of American troops from Iraq could also work in favour of peace. As their American mentors leave, the Iraqi Kurds are turning to Turkey for protection. In exchange they seem willing to limit the movements of some 3,000-5,000 PKK fighters based in their region and to help disarm and repatriate them to Turkey under a proposed amnesty.

More than Mr Erdogan’s career is at stake. So is Turkey’s future. A new generation of dissatisfied and radical Kurds could easily unleash a cycle of violence that even the PKK might be unable to control. What is most heartening is that the Kurdish initiative is not merely about responding to European Union pressure: it is a home-grown affair. And the onus is as much on the PKK and its allies as on the government to ensure that it succeeds. It will not be easy, but Mr Erdogan seems determined to plough on. If he succeeds, says Sezgin Tanrikulu, a human-rights lawyer in Diyarbakir, the Kurds will flock to back him—and Ataturk’s words will no longer ring so hollow.