July 21, 2007 | Doug Saunders | Read Bio | Latest Columns

DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY -- Like most Kurds here in southeastern Turkey, Abdurrahman Oguz has never had an easy time with the Turkish government.

First they ousted his schoolteacher - who had tried to teach the outlawed Kurdish language - and forced Mr. Oguz to learn only Turkish. Then they forced him to adopt a Turkish name. Then they eliminated his family's village, forcing him to move to the teeming refugee city of Diyarbakir.

So it is surprising to discover that tomorrow, Mr. Oguz will be voting, for the first time, for Turkey's governing party.

Previously, Kurds have either turned away from politics and supported illegal separatist movements, or have cast their ballots with the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), which is small enough that it has no effect in parliament.

But now, it appears that large numbers of Kurds, disillusioned with their own movements and wary of further violent confrontations, are preparing to vote tomorrow for the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"I've come to realize that the DTP is strictly a regional party, and now I see that AKP is searching for solutions to the problems of the entire country," Mr. Oguz said the other day as he drank tea with fellow Kurds outside a Diyarbakir mosque. "The DTP cannot answer the problems of the Kurds. We need a national party who will take our concerns seriously."

If Kurds actually do vote in large numbers for Mr. Erdogan's party, it will be a historic development. The governing AKP has built itself as an outsiders' party, appealing to the peasants, slum-dwellers and religious believers. Its officials say it makes sense that Kurds, as the ultimate outsiders in Turkey, should want to join.

"The Kurds do not see us as the instruments of the state," said Ihsan Arslan, a Kurdish newspaper owner who is running as the AKP's star candidate here in Diyarbakir. "They actually see that we are too in a struggle with the Turkish state. We are in the same position [as the Kurds] against the state."

Successive Turkish governments have lumped the Kurdish population in with the radical Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) separatist movement, whose terrorist tactics have led to a prolonged war with the Turkish army and the outlawing of most Kurdish culture.

AKP politicians such as Mr. Arslan are now promising a very different approach, in which Kurdish rights and regional semi-autonomy might be offered in exchange for a laying-down of arms, similar to the British government process that led to peace in Northern Ireland