Windows shattered by looting protesters, the largest city in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast shows plenty of signs of the violence that swept it last week, but optimism over a fragile peace process with Kurdish guerrillas is far harder to find.
There are fears that the fate of the border town of Kobane in neighbouring Syria could wreck efforts by the Turkish government to end a three decades long insurgency by the militants, and tip Turkey back into a conflict that has cost 40,000 lives.
Many of Turkey’s 15 million Kurds have reacted with fury over the fate of mainly Kurdish Kobane, under assault by Islamic State for nearly a month while Turkish troops look on.
Last week at least 35 people were killed as Kurdish protests in solidarity with Kobane turned violent, with Diyarbakir at the centre of the bloodletting.
Kurds say that fury over Ankara’s failure to intervene could spin out of control in spite of efforts by the government or jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan to continue with peace talks aimed at ending the uprising.
“If Kobane falls, the peace process will be history. And if Kobane falls, the people will not listen to calls for calm, from whomever they come,” said chain-smoking Ibrahim, 29, in a tea house in Diyarbakir’s poor Baglar district, a PKK hotbed.
Days earlier, the streets of Baglar were filled with tear gas as police clashed with protesters. The area briefly became a no-go zone for security forces, and armoured vehicles were deployed to quell the unrest.
A police officer told Reuters the rage of the protesters was like nothing he had seen in 20 years working in the region.
“They attack like they have nothing to lose. There seems to be an immense amount of hate and anger,” he said. “They’re looting. They burn, break, destroy. The state and everything that represents the state seems to be their enemy.”
The unrest is a serious blow to President Tayyip Erdogan, who has invested considerable political capital in repairing Turkey’s relations with its Kurds.
Decades of oppression by nationalist governments in Ankara had aimed to suppress Kurdish culture, prompting a violent response by Kurdish militants and creating deep ethnic wounds within Turkey which Erdogan has vowed to heal.
He has pushed through cultural reforms and abolished laws banning the Kurdish language in Turkey.
Around half of Kurds vote for Erdogan’s ruling AK Party and the peace process has been a major part of his political vision.
But Ankara’s failure to intervene militarily or allow weapons to be sent to Kobane’s defenders has caused mistrust, and fuelled rumours that Turkey secretly supports Islamic State.
Denials by Ankara have failed to quell a widespread belief in southeast Turkey that a policy of supporting opposition groups in Syria to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad means they are helping the radical Islamist group.
“It’s not even questioned. If you base your thinking on that, and build on top of all these grievances over the last few years (including Kobane), then you’ve got the makings of fresh conflict,” Aaron Stein, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Reuters.
Stein believes that Turkey calculates that it is better to alienate the Kurds now and patch things up later than be sucked into the Syria conflict over Kobane, and that the Kurds are currently too weak to re-ignite hostilities with Turkey.
But the threat of renewed conflict was underlined at the weekend by senior PKK commander Cemil Bayik, who warned that the group would relaunch its war with Turkey if it fails to intervene in Kobane.