Turkey PM announces reforms key to Kurdish peace process

Turkey yesterday moved to scrap restrictions on the use of the minority Kurdish language among democratic reforms seen as key to the stalled peace process with the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also announced that women in the civil service, with a few exceptions, will henceforth be allowed to wear the Muslim headscarf.
"Turkey is irreversibly moving in the direction of democracy," Erdogan told a news conference. "This is a historic moment, an important stage."
Kurdish-language education will be permitted in private schools, and candidates in elections will be allowed to campaign in Kurdish, Erdogan announced.
The reforms will also aim to ease rules preventing pro-Kurdish and other smaller parties from entering parliament, he said.
Turkey has long refused to recognise the Kurds, a largely Sunni Muslim people who were considered cofounders of the new republic born from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
The minority of some 15 million has complained of discrimination at the hands of the Turkish state, which they claim deprived them of their Kurdish identity and stigmatised them as "mountain Turks".
Among other reforms the prime minister announced, schoolchildren will no longer be required to recite the pledge of allegiance -- "How happy is the one who calls himself a Turk" -- each morning.
In addition, towns can revert to their previous Kurdish names, and a quirky ban on the use of three letters of the Kurdish alphabet that do not exist in Turkish will be lifted, he said.