Turkey's parliament began talks on Tuesday on improving Kurdish minority rights, a move which could support Ankara's European Union bid and which the government says will help end a 25-year separatist insurgency, Reuters reported.
The plan is aimed at ending a conflict in which more than 40,000 people have died, but the opposition sees it as a gift to Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas.
The reforms could include easing restrictions on the use of the once-banned Kurdish language and taking steps to encourage the PKK militants to surrender.
"The purpose of the initiative is to end terror and heighten the level of democracy," Interior Minister Besir Atalay told parliament.
"We have not showed the slightest weakness on (fighting) terror. We want this suffering to end. Chronic terror has become a gigantic, evil business," Atalay said.
The initiative builds on steps which Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party (AKP) government has already taken to expand cultural rights for Kurds, such as the launch of a state-run Kurdish language television channel. These steps have been welcomed by the EU, and further moves could provide a much-needed boost to Turkey's stalled membership drive.
Opposition parties are fiercely opposed to the reform process, arguing that it threatens to undermine Turkey's unity.
"AKP is trying to achieve by politics what the PKK failed to achieve by guns. This is a useless effort, a dead-end street," senior Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) deputy Mehmet Sandir told broadcaster NTV before the debate.
Parliament was holding a preliminary debate on the reforms on Tuesday despite opposition protests that it coincided with the 71st anniversary of the death of modern Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Erdogan was expected to address the assembly at a second debate on the issue on Thursday.
As part of the reform process, dubbed a "democratic initiative", the government has submitted to parliament a bill which would in part lessen the heavy punishments imposed in the past on children involved in pro-PKK protests.
A small group of PKK rebels and sympathisers have already returned to Turkey and were released by the state authorities as a tentative step towards ending the conflict.
PKK violence has dwindled over the last couple of years after a series of Turkish air raids on their bases in northern Iraq, which has severely affected the group's ability to stage cross-border raids into southeast Turkey.
Turkey debates Kurdish reforms favoured by EU
