In Turkey, Signs of Change for the Kurds

A yellow digger, creaky and crusted with mud, sits in front of a crowd of about 200 people outside a little-used military facility in the Turkish town of Silopi. The digger's engine hums. In a minute it will roll forward, past the grieving relatives dressed in their Sunday best, past the chain-smoking lawyers in somber suits, past blank-faced sentries and a television broadcast van beaming pictures around the country, and head on into one of the most controversial issues in Turkey's murky recent history.

In the 1990s, at the height of a dirty war fought against Kurdish separatists,...