Turkey allows Kurdish conference

Kurdish is being used in a literary conference which opened on Tuesday in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir.

The week-long event is being attended by Kurdish writers and intellectuals from Turkey itself and abroad.

It follows a series of fundamental reforms linked to Turkey’s long-term bid to join the European Union, including measures to promote Kurdish.

Local officials admit such a conference would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when Ankara was in the midst of a bloody 15-year conflict with a separatist Kurdish group, the PKK.