"There are dozens of arrests every day. I have not seen such oppression since the 1990s," lamented Meral Danis Bestas, deputy chairwoman of Turkey's main Kurdish political movement, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).

"If you arrest all politicians, it is impossible for those in the mountains to lay down arms," she said, referring to militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought Ankara since 1984.

Several hundred Kurds, among them elected local officials, have been rounded up in several operations over the past year on charges of collaborating with the PKK, listed as a "terrorist" group by Ankara.

Speaking in her law office in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the mainly Kurdish southeast, Bestas said the crackdown had prompted an increasing number of youths "to go to the mountains," to join PKK bases in Turkey and neighbouring Iraq.

The police stepped up the operations in December, overriding criticism that the crackdown was undermining a government plan for "courageous" reforms to expand Kurdish freedoms.

Ankara announced the plan with much fanfare in August, hoping to mend fences with its sizeable Kurdish community and curb popular support for the PKK insurgency, which has claimed some 45,000 lives.

Abdullah Ocalan -- who remains the PKK's uncontested leader despite being behind bars, serving a life sentence since 1999 -- was also expected to unveil his proposals for peace, but they never reached the public realm.

The government, meanwhile, reduced its reform initiative to modest measures including lifting some restrictions on the Kurdish language and establishing special bodies to stamp out human rights abuses and discrimination.

But the so-called "democratic opening" suffered a heavy blow in December when the PKK ambushed and killed seven soldiers and the Constitutional Court outlawed Turkey's main Kurdish party for links to the rebels, sparking violent protests across the southeast.

The BDP has since succeeded the disbanded party, but Kurdish optimism that peace may be within reach has now vanished.

"The democratic opening means nothing to us. The opening should be to stop the deaths of youths, both from the mountains and the army," said Ramazan Akcicek, the elderman of an impoverished Diyarbakir district, home to thousands of Kurds who fled their villages to escape the conflict.

"The people who can be of any use (in the political struggle) are arrested, while the others do not speak up," said a local resident as children's chanting echoed from a nearby school: "I am Turkish! I am honest! I am hard-working!"

The ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), which enjoys solid popularity in the region, insists that the reconciliation plan is not dead and the government is committed to reform.

"The democratic opening is not necessarily a package of laws. It is a process over time," said Baki Aksoy, the AKP provincial chief in Diyarbakir.

Recognising the Kurdish language and culture "in a country where they were ignored for decades is already something," he argued.

Many observers say that even if the "democratic opening" may have failed, it has broken taboos on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and opened the door for a free debate on how a settlement should be reached.

But some, including the head of the Diyarbakir Chamber of Commerce, Galip Ensarioglu, say that domestic politics mean the government is not yet prepared to go far enough.

"It should be ready to take the risk of losing elections," he said.