"We have decided to run in the elections with independent candidates," Ahmet Turk, the head of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying.

He was speaking after a two-day party meeting in the mainly Kurdish southeastern city of Diyarbakir to decide on their strategy for early legislative elections brought forward from November.

Many Kurds have become legislators in Turkey as members of mainstream parties, but pro-Kurdish movements have failed to overcome the 10-percent bar to enter parliament, even though they usually dominate the vote in most areas in the southeast and routinely win the local administrations.

Fielding independent candidates may allow them to by-pass the barrier in the elections. Once in parliament, the winning deputies can again regroup under the DTP banner.

Turk said they would field independent candidates in areas where the DTP is traditionally strong and back "enlightened, democratic candidates" in other regions.

He gave no further details, but the media has tipped human rights award winner Leyla Zana as one of the party's possible candidates.

Zana and several other Kurdish politicians entered parliament in 1991 on the ticket of a center-left party, but they lost their seats in 1994 after the Kurdish party which they later joined was outlawed for having links to armed Kurdish rebels fighting the government.

Zana, the 1995 laureate of the European Parliament's Sakharov human rights award, and three others spent 10 years behind bars for alleged links with armed rebels. They were convicted on the same charge in a retrial in March, but will not have to go back to jail.

Kurdish politicians are routinely accused of being instruments of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has led a bloody separatist insurgency in the southeast since 1984 and is listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community.

The DTP was set up in November 2005 as a successor of other Kurdish movements, which were outlawed by the courts.

It has pledged to try to resolve the Kurdish conflict through peaceful means, but has so far made no progress.