Kurdish people in Turkey

•Jacob Kunzler, head of a missionary hospital in Urfa, has documented the large scale ethnic cleansing of Kurds by the Young Turks during World War I.

•By the end of World War I, up to 700,000 Kurds were forcibly deported and almost half of the displaced perished.

•The 1970s: Kurdish nationalism influenced by Marxist political thought - eventually forming the PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, European Union, NATO and many states that includes United States.

•1994: Leyla Zana

•She was recognized as a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International

•In 1994 she was awarded the Rafto Prize and in 1995, was awarded the Sakharov prize by the European parliament.

•With Turkey applying to become a member of the EU, the EU repeatedly called for her release on human rights grounds.

Multiculturalism, Assimilation

Due to the large number of Turkish Kurds, successive governments have viewed the expression of a Kurdish identity as a potential threat to Turkish unity.

Kurdish publications created throughout the 1960s and 1970s were shut down under various legal pretexts. In 1980, the Kurdish language was officially banned in government institutions.

US Congressman Bob Filner spoke of a "cultural genocide", stressing that "a way of life known as Kurdish is disappearing at an alarming rate".

Kurd Protests: Turkey is accused of electric shock torture

Kurds are being systematically subjected to electric shock treatments and other sophisticated tortures by the Turkish government. Men and women are being suspended naked from the ceiling, hosed with cold water, and beaten on the soles of their feet, a two-year study reveals.

Sirwan, 27, who is from a Kurdish village in eastern Turkey, was arrested after taking part in a pro-democracy May Day march in Istanbul in 1996. She said that she was taken to a police station, blindfolded, stripped and beaten when she refused to give names of other demonstrators.

"While I was suspended they applied wires to my left foot and fingers and gave me electric shocks," she said.

"Then they put wires on my breasts and on my genitals and threw cold water on my body to make the electric shock treatment more effective.“

She said a doctor had been present during the torture to ensure she was kept alive.

Now living in London, Sirwan said: "I was released by the courts after 14 days and I knew I could never look at the world with the same eyes again.“

Turkey's continued use of torture has attracted criticism from the United Nations Committee against Torture and the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture.

In response, the Turkish government has ordered to forbid the use of torture and has set up human rights training courses. A human rights minister has also been appointed.

Feb, 1999

In 2009, the state-run broadcaster, TRT, launched a channel (TRT 6) in the Kurdish language. Famous Kurdish musicians attended the inauguration, at which the prime minister made a speech in Kurdish.

The rights of the Kurdish media and other broadcasters have been extended.

The Economist:"reforms have slowed, prosecutions of writers for insulting Turkishness have continued, renewed fighting has broken out with Kurds and a new mood of nationalism has taken hold", but it is also stressed that "in the past four years the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, improved rights for Kurds".

Status quo