DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - Not so long ago playing Kurdish music over a loudspeaker into the streets here might have provoked the Turkish police. These days hundreds of CDs featuring Kurdish pop singers fill a long wall in the small, shoebox-shaped Vizyon Muzik Market. Abdulvahap Ciftci, the 25-yearold Kurd who runs the place, told me that customers buy some 250 Kurdish albums a week. “And maybe I sell one Turkish album.”

For months pro-Kurdish activists have been staging rallies that during recent weeks have increasingly turned into violent confrontations with the police in this heavily Kurdish region of the southeast. Capitalizing on the Arab Spring , as well as on Turkey’s vocal support for Egyptian reformers, in elections this month the Kurds here pressed for broader parliamentary representation and more freedoms, political and cultural.

Since the 1920s, when Turkey started forcibly assimilating its Kurds, roughly 20 percent of the population, in a struggle to forge a nation-state out of the broken remnants of the Ottoman Empire, they have resisted. Since the mid-1980s tens of thousands on both sides have died. This must now be the world’s longest bloody conflict.

In March a Turkish movie, “Press,” opened in Istanbul, recounting the torture and killing of dozens of journalists working for Ozgur Gundem, a newspaper here at the epicenter of the Kurdish struggle. More than 75 of its employees were killed from 1992 to 1994, when the paper was shut down by the government. Only just recently it went back into print. Still, the movie’s 38-year-old director, Sedat Yilmaz, told me recently, the police wanted to make sure he used fake copies of Ozgur Gundem, not real ones.

“It is now at least possible to talk about issues a little more openly,” Mr. Yilmaz said. “The best way to do this is through films and plays and music, which is finally starting to happen.”

But change comes slowly, if at all here. Concessions by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2009 made way for the first Kurdish national television station, and the government also permitted the teaching of Kurdish language classes in private universities.

Token gestures, they made frontpage headlines: first because they were signals to the outside world that a democratic state run by an Islamic leader will not automatically become xenophobic or tribalist, and second because even small steps toward acknowledging Kurdish culture can provoke political firestorms . Turkish nationalists raised a ruckus.

Turkish Kurds say that increased cultural freedom only encourages their loyalty to the Turkish state.

“In our estimation, assimilation is a human rights violation,’’ said Gulten Kisanak, co-chairwoman of the pro- Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party . ‘’It’s a natural part of urbanization too, and Turkish urbanization has steadily threatened Kurdish culture, our music, our lullabies and fairy tales, which, coming from our villages, used to be how we transferred our heritage to new generations.’’

But the recent arrests of large numbers of Kurdish political activists have fed the Kurds’ concern that the government never really had true democracy in mind for them but simply kept up appearances for Western consumption.

“The changes are meaningful but still not sufficient,” said Burhan Senatalar, a professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul.

“If you asked Turks today whether, in the abstract, people should be able to speak their mother tongue, most of them would say, of course, no problem,” he said. “But with Kurdish, fear clouds the picture. Language is the biggest Kurdish demand because language equals identity. It’s the root of any culture, and many Kurds, having had their language repressed, no longer even know the basics of Kurdish grammar. So the debate has inevitably turned to language. To have cultural demands beyond language you need qualified people to write plays and make art, and during the 1980s you had so many Kurdish people tortured that they didn’t have time to think about cultural questions, which means there’s still a long way to go.”

There are now more Kurdishlanguage books to be found in bookstores here. A theater troupe stages productions in Kurdish in Diyarbakir. And Kurdish music, including Dengbej, the traditional Kurdish sung-speech, is everywhere.

“Compared to the past, we’re better off,” Mr. Ciftci said. “Eighty percent of our identity as Kurds is in our music. If you are Kurdish today, even if you don’t speak the language, you can hear a song in Kurdish, and your soul roars. It makes you feel part of a struggle.”


MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY