By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA and CEREN KUMOVA, The Associated Press . Saturday, January 8, 2011; 7:22 AM
ANKARA, Turkey — As a child, Emrah Kilic couldn’t understand a word his grandmother was saying. That’s because she was speaking Kurdish, the family’s ancestral language, whose public use was harshly suppressed in the name of forging a unified Turkish nation.
Raised by parents who shed their ethnic roots to blend in with the Turkish mainstream, he now finds himself in a quandary. “I am confused about whether I should pursue the roots,” he says. “But I am scared that it will change things, open a Pandora’s box.”
The 28-year-old’s dilemma is understandable. As Turkey’s Kurds struggle for recognition of their ethnicity, their embattled Kurdish language is making a comeback that is testing Turkish society’s tolerance of diversity. The current government, more accepting of minority aspirations, has loosened the language curbs, but this is provoking a backlash from nationalists who fear the country’s identity is under threat.
Turkey’s 20 percent Kurdish minority has been a traditional target of state discrimination and the more militant among them have waged a 26-year insurgency that killed tens of thousands. The violence has ebbed for now, but ahead of parliamentary elections in June, the nationalists worry that the escalating push for language rights masks a more ambitious goal – autonomy.
“When you go to the weekly bazaar, you hear nothing but Kurdish,” grumbles Ikbal Erdogan, 36, a dentist in Adana, a city with a large Kurdish population. “I do not shop from those who try to make it clear that they are Kurdish. I think we should protest those who try to break our unity under our noses.”
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