TURKEY: Kurdish villagers are finally receiving some recompense for their treatment by the Turkish military, reports Nicholas Birch in Silvan, near Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey
Bringing life back to Caldere is a slow process.
Tucked into a fold of southeastern mountain, the village was emptied and partially destroyed in 1995 by Turkish security forces as part of a campaign to expunge local support for Kurdish separatist rebels.
A decade on, only 40 of 350 families have returned. Their new homes are barely visible amid the ruins of old stone houses and overgrown orchards.
"It doesn't inspire optimism, does it?" says Huseyin Yildizoz, who moved back in 2001. "But I can't remember feeling as optimistic as I do today."
"What we've lacked so far is money," agrees Caldere's former imam, Suphan Kilic. "Now we finally look as though we're going to get some."
Like 150 other villagers, both men applied early this year for damages under a new compensation law aimed at the civilian victims of Turkey's 15-year Kurdish war. Some 3,000 villages were emptied between 1984 and 1999, according to government statistics, and at least 380,000 people forced into internal exile.
In Caldere's case, the long wait for an official response ended a fortnight back, when a commission from the district capital of Silvan came up to visit. The survey took more than a week.
"It's a complicated process", says Nurullah Ucar, the civil servant who heads Silvan's compensation commission. "To estimate damages, we have to measure houses and confirm land rights. We have to count trees too." He estimates damage payments to Caldere residents will be between €1.8 and €2.3 million .
That is around a tenth of the amount they would be likely to get from the European Court of Human Rights, which has ordered Turkey to pay individual victims of village clearances an average of €130,000.
It is a disparity that has led some to claim the compensation law is just Turkey's way of dealing with the aftermath of war as economically as possible. The fact the commissions are expected to work unpaid only deepens such suspicions.
"For the civil servants on the commission, this may not be a problem", says Dilek Kurban, who is investigating the law for the Istanbul-based think-tank Tesev. "But every commission also has a lawyer, and they can hardly be expected to give up their time for nothing."
Money shortages, she thinks, are a major reason why claims for damages have been processed so slowly. According to statistics released by the Interior Ministry last month, only 5,239 of a total of 104,734 applications made since the law came into force last October had been considered, and only 1,190 accepted for compensation.
The figures prompted one opposition lawmaker to describe the law as "a complete fiasco" and demand an extension of its one-year mandate. Parliament will probably grant him his wish next week.
What it is unlikely to do is to change the structure of the eight-man compensation commissions, seven of whom are civil servants. Given that most villages were cleared by the state, critics say, such commissions can hardly be expected to judge claims impartially.
On paper, says Mahmut Vefa, lawyer for the Caldere villagers, the biggest problem is the law's demand that claimants provide an official statement describing why they left their villages.
"If a military policeman burnt your house and told you to leave, would you turn round and ask him for a report detailing what had happened?" he jokes.
Fortunately, he adds, some commissions are more enlightened than the law they have to work with.
"Just five years ago, when the older generation of officials were still here, this law would have been a waste of the paper it was written on," agrees one Diyarbakir civil servant. "But the younger generation is made up of pragmatists." That may be true of Diyarbakir, analysts say. But high rejection rates elsewhere - particularly in the mountainous eastern provinces of Sirnak and Hakkari - suggest true enlightenment is still some way off.
Up in Caldere, much of the debate appears to have passed the villagers by. Like other locals, they insist the district governor now in charge in Silvan is better than any they can remember.
Above all, they see the law as the first evidence that Turkey is truly aware of their existence.
"I can't think of a single time in the past when my rights were taken into consideration", says Gazi Tas.
"[ Prime minister] Tayyip Erdogan recently acknowledged the state had made mistakes in the southeast", adds Suphan Kilic, the former imam. "This law is an indirect admission of responsibility for the clearances." At a time when pessimists are warning of the danger of ethnic war between Kurds and Turks, such remarks are evidence of a groundswell of local goodwill the government would do well not to ignore.