They play backgammon and swap stories and dream of going home. Their village was burnt and evacuated more than six years ago by the Turkish army, at the height of its battle against the PKK Kurdish rebel movement. Kurdish men are dislocated and feel disposessed The coffee house is in the centre of the teeming city of Diyarbakir, where the villagers have joined hundreds of thousands of other refugees forced out of the surrounding countryside. The intensity of the Kurdish war in south-eastern Turkey has faded as the military has saturated the region with tens of thousands of troops. The sense of dislocation is as strong as ever, though.
Conflict still rages in the minds of the dispossessed.
A few Kurds are being allowed to return to outlying areas if they promise to join a state-run village guard system. But for the majority of local people little has changed and anything which seems to offer a glimmer of hope is hotly debated. Before his capture by the Turkish authorities, the separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan said he wanted to transform the PKK's main focus from military to political activity. The PKK may not speak for the majority, but many people in Diyarbakir are willing to declare privately that the rebels remain their best bet. They do not like everything the PKK has done in its violent campaign, but no one else has given them any feeling of empowerment at all.