One after another, the villagers stepped forward in their tattered clothes, took the courtroom oath and spoke of a previously unutterable crimes.

One of the first was Emine Toprak, an elderly Kurdish woman whose cracked and withered face hinted at her story to come.

''I was sitting in the house with my children, and they came and said we are going to burn your house, and so we got out,'' Ms. Toprak told a row of silk-robbed Turkish judges seated before her.

''Who burned your village?'' one of the Turkish judges asked.

''The government forces,'' Ms. Toprak answered.

So it was in a third-floor Turkish courtroom last week that a handful of Kurdish villagers broke the silence that has prevailed in this country over what human rights groups here say was one of the most violent secrets of the 1990's: the systematic campaign by Turkish security forces to burn down villages of Kurds suspected of harboring separatist guerrillas.

Turkish policy toward the Kurds has since become conciliatory. But the courtroom scene was a powerful reminder of how much bad history hangs over Turkish plans -- initially encouraged by the Bush administration -- to deploy troops in Iraq, where four to five million Kurds live in the northern part of the country.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.