A prosecutor in Diyarbakir, the region's biggest city, accused Ibrahim Guclu and Zeynel Abidin Ozalp of "spreading propaganda" for the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in a May 2 press statement.

A third activist, a Turkish national, was also charged, the sources said.

The trial is expected to start next week.

Guclu and Ozalp were members of a Kurdish cultural association the authorities banned in April because its statutes called for the use of the Kurdish language in its activities, illegal under Turkish law.

The statement denounced army operations against the PKK -- blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara, the European Union and the United States -- and claimed that a recent military build-up in the southeast targeted the "entire Kurdish people."

Many Kurdish dissidents were granted political asylum in European countries in the 1990s, when the prosecution of activists and intellectuals opposed to the official stance on the Kurdish question was a common occurrence.

Some have returned to Turkey over the past few years after Ankara undertook a series of reforms to expand Kurdish cultural freedoms as part of efforts to boost its bid for membership in the EU.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed more than 37,000 lives since the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast in 1984.