TURKEY: Turkey fears a resumption of the Kurdish separatist campaign, writes Nicholas Birch in Istanbul.
With terrorist attacks in eastern Anatolia last week raising the spectre of a return to Turkey's 15-year war against Kurdish separatists, Turkish parliamentarians are hurrying this week to pass a controversial amnesty law aimed at persuading guerrillas to down weapons and return home from mountain camps in northern Iraq.
"Except for a very limited group, everyone will benefit," Turkey's Interior Minister, Mr Abdulkadir Aksu, told journalists last month. Those "who have not committed any crime except for involvement in a terrorist organisation and who surrender will go home at once". His government is likely to be hard-pressed persuading others to share its optimism.
"If [the Turks] insist on annihilation and denial," PKK commander Murat Karayilan told the German-based Kurdish newspaper Ozgur Politika on July 2nd, "we will be left with only one option: a war of honour." His remarks surprised no one: like other senior PKK members, Mr Karayilan is expressly excluded from the amnesty bill.
Turkish Kurds less directly involved are equally critical, though.
While they support the planned amnesty for guerrillas uninvolved in attacks on Turkish targets, they argue that clauses offering reduced prison sentences to more serious offenders in exchange for intelligence about their former comrades will render the law useless.
With an estimated 5,000 PKK members in northern Iraq, "the surrender of one or two hundred of them will not solve the problem", says Mr Osman Ozcelik, deputy head of a Kurdish party popular in south-east Turkey. He points out that six previous amnesty bills passed since 1984 only managed to rustle up 900 defections.
"PKK members ready to disarm and rejoin society do not want to face humiliation," he explains.
Turkey's pragmatic government is a far cry from the nationalist-minded coalition that collapsed in polls last November.
But with public opinion largely hostile to the bill, the chances of it accepting demands from Mr Ozcelik and others for a full amnesty have always been zero.
In any case, says US-based Kurdish expert Mr Henri Barkey, "even a liberal amnesty is unlikely to be enough to break up PKK diehards on its own. It must be backed up by the threat of force, US force."
This is where the current crisis in Turkish-US relations risks proving decisive.
Already damaged by Turkey's refusal in March to permit the deployment of US troops, the two countries' 50-year strategic friendship hit a new low on July 4th with the US-led arrest of 11 Turkish soldiers based in northern Iraq.
A joint inquiry into the arrests ended this Monday with US generals expressing their regret at what had happened.
They offered no clarification to allegations that the Turks had been involved in a plot to destabilise growing Iraqi Kurdish power by assassinating a local Kurdish governor.
The question is, analysts say, whether tensions over Iraq's Kurds may be undermining the one aspect of regional policy Ankara and Washington have always agreed on: the pressing need to dismantle the PKK.
Washington tacitly accepts the continued presence of Turkish troops in northern Iraq until the PKK is disbanded, says Turkish commentator Mr Mehmet Ali Birand. "But America's new allies [the Kurds] are pushing to render ineffective the Turkish military presence there."
Mr Barkey said: "This is not an atmosphere conducive to sympathy for Turkey's very real security concerns."