VAN, Turkey - After 15 years of civil war, the Kurds of Turkey are ready to go home. But the years of turmoil and displacement have transformed them - and their villages - so that home is becoming ever more difficult to find.

Thousands of Kurdish villages here in eastern Turkey were emptied, the farms abandoned, as the Kurds fled to the city to escape the war.

On their farms, they could survive, even turn a profit. In the city, they have nothing - there's little use for agricultural skills here. Most lack steady jobs, and they earn little.

As they struggle in the city, they grow farther from their farming lives. For many, it is becoming too late to return to the countryside. Lost in the world of the city, they are losing their places in their rural world, too.

Late last month, Turkey lifted the emergency rule on the last two Kurdish regions in southeastern Turkey - Sirnak, near the Iraqi border, and Diyarbakir, the main city in the southeast. The decision was an indication that the government considers its conflict with Kurdish separatists to finally be ending. Yet, few villagers have been able to return home.

The government estimates that 380,000 people fled to the cities before 1999, when Kurdish separatists announced a unilateral cease-fire in a war that had taken 37,000 lives. Human Rights Watch says the number of displaced villagers could be closer to 1 million, most of them forced to leave by soldiers intent on cutting off rebel supplies.

Hoping for work

The cities offer little for former villagers like Nevzat Ertunc, 28, who waits outside a little shop with a dozen or so other men hoping for a job hauling lumber. Conversation stops when a truck slows as it rounds the corner - perhaps the driver is looking for workers - but the talk picks up as it pulls away.

"It's like an animal market," Ertunc says. "People choose, then take us to work."

With the exception of one longtime, white-haired porter, the men are former villagers from the mountainous back country. Though some are too young to have worked the soil, they all remember their homes as lands of plenty.

"We were growing rice, corn, wheat," Ertunc says. "It was perfect there. The only thing we were buying was salt."

In the city, he says, he is lucky to get paid twice a week, a couple of dollars each time.

Few would-be returnees have obtained permission from the government to go back, says Human Rights Watch. Many who seek the permission balk when asked to declare it was the rebels - not government forces - who forced them to leave.

Some report being given the go-ahead by federally appointed regional governors, only to be turned back by security forces. Others say that village guards - paramilitary forces armed by the government - have taken over their land. Government programs are either ineffectual or help only the village guards, says Human Rights Watch.

Even if return were possible, it would not be enough, says Celal Tanhan, a lawyer suing the government on behalf of five villages. "The property has been destroyed," he says. "It would be pointless to go back if there is nothing."

His clients want not only permission to return, but compensation for what they lost.

Sabri Mamuk, a gray-haired farmer who says he is "over 50," is one client. He says Selat, a 40-family hamlet in the Van district, was stuck between the rebels and the army. Rebels would come at night, demanding food. Soldiers would demand information in the morning.

By 1989, the army was coming through every day, he says. The villagers were given a choice: Take up arms against the rebels as village guards, or leave.

"We could bring some furniture, animals," Mamuk says. "But when we arrived here, we couldn't feed them [their animals], and we had to sell them for very cheap prices."

He says he has returned since the cease-fire to see his old village, and saw only rubble. The village had pooled its resources to bring running water from 12 miles away. The pipes had been torn out.

The federal government denies that security forces evicted villagers.

"This is all propaganda," says Durmus Kec, Van's federally appointed governor. "The terrorists ruined everything. Now the government is rebuilding."

Kec says anybody can return to his or her village. The government has built small towns for the displaced and distributed about $650,000 in construction material so homes can be rebuilt, he says. If villagers remain in the city, Kec says, it's because the women and the youths have gotten used to its freedoms.

Official word disputed

But Cengiz Karakoyun, Van's elected mayor and a Kurd, disagrees. While some are allowed to move back seasonally for the harvest, he says, few have been able to return permanently.

"The German consulate visited and spoke to the governor, who told them that 12,000 people were sent by us back to their villages," Karakoyun says. "But he can't even prove that 12 families have gone."

Tanhan does not expect to win his case before the government. He is, he says, simply exhausting local options before petitioning the European Court of Human Rights, where a few villages have won cases.

Turkey's treatment of its 12 million Kurds has been a major issue in the country's relationship to the European Union, which last week decided not to admit it until Turkey could demonstrate improvement in its human rights record.

The international law is clear. The United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement note that while people can be forced from their homes for security, they must be compensated, and allowed to return once the trouble has passed.

Still, very few have won cases and the process is long. Tanhan expects it will take at least five years before a verdict is known.

Meanwhile, his clients are losing their connection to their land. Sabri Mamuk has six boys, just two of whom can remember the village. His oldest, Mehmet Mamuk, 22, was 9 years old when the family left.

"If we stay in Van, I can only be a builder," Mehmet says. "I can't get a better job because I can't read or write."

For him, a return to the village means a chance to make a living, to provide a better future for his 1-year-old daughter, Rodja.

"I would like her to be educated," he says, "to be helpful for the people."

But it may be too late. Mehmet doesn't know how to farm. In his dispersed village, that memory rests with the older generation.