TURKEY RENAMES VILLAGE AS PART OF KURDISH REFORMS
By Ibon Villelabeitia

Reuters
Thu Aug 20, 2009 6:35am EDT

ANKARA, Aug 20 (Reuters) – Turkey has begun restoring names of Kurdish
villages and is considering allowing religious sermons to be made
in Kurdish as part of reforms to answer the grievances of the ethnic
minority and advance its EU candidacy.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has said his government will push
democratic reforms to address decades-old grievances from the Kurdish
population and help end a 25-year conflict between the state and
separatist guerrillas.

Erdogan, who has given few details on the measures and their
timeframe, is seeking public, military and parliamentary support
for his "Kurdish initiative", aimed at persuading Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK) rebels to lay down arms and end an insurgency that has
killed some 40,000 people.

The conflict has long hampered Ankara’s European Union membership
bid and weighed on the local economy.

Analysts say some of the expected measures will require difficult legal
and constitution reforms for which Erdogan needs broad consensus,
but the main opposition parties have rejected a call for talks,
arguing the process threatened Turkey’s unity.

Turkey’s estimated 12 million Kurds out of a population of 72 million
have long complained of discrimination by the state.

Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AK Party, which first came to power in 2002,
has taken some steps to expand political and cultural rights for Kurds,
partly under pressure from the EU.

Haberturk daily said the provincial council of Diyarbakir in the mainly
Kurdish southeast had restored the old Kurdish name to a hamlet and
the state-appointed provincial governor had not objected. The governor
had challenged similar moves by the council in court in the past.

"POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT" Villagers had applied to the council for it
to accept the name Celkaniya for their settlement in place of the
Turkish name Kirkpinar. The council is dominated by the pro-Kurdish
Democratic Society Party (DTP).

"This is a very positive development. We are still in shock. The
government’s democratic initiative project is bearing fruit for the
first time in Diyarbakir," the paper quoted council chairman Sehmus
Bayhan, from the DTP, as saying.

More than 12,000 village names, some 35 percent of the total, were
changed in Turkey between 1940-2000 under a "Turkification" drive,
according to a report by Milliyet daily.

The name change initiative, dating back to the Ottoman era before
World War One, was also designed to give Turkish names to places with
Armenian, Greek and Bulgarian names, it said.

Hurriyet newspaper reported Interior Minister Besir Atalay, who
has been holding talks with political parties, business groups and
Turkey’s generals on the "Kurdish initiative", as saying he would
discuss with the country’s religious authorities the possibility of
sermons being made in Kurdish.

Under the plan, sermons in the main cities in the southeast will remain
in Turkish but in villages where the population is completely Kurdish,
preachers will be allowed to choose whether they conduct sermons in
Turkish or Kurdish.

Erdogan was due to chair a national security meeting later on Thursday
to discuss the Kurdish reforms with ministers and the country’s top
commander, General Ilker Basbug.

The jailed guerrilla leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, had been
expected last weekend to issue a "road-map" of his own on how to
resolve the conflict, but this has been delayed. (Additional reporting
by Daren Butler in Istanbul) (Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)