TURKEY: Armed village guards or local militias are still being paid by the government, writes Nicholas Birch in south-east Turkey.
In the autumn of 1993, war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish separatist PKK and pressure from neighbours who had taken up arms for the government forced the Tekin family to leave their village of Ugrak.
Now, nine years later, the local authorities had given them the green light to return home. But their joy at being back on their land was to be short-lived. A mere four hours after they arrived in Ugrak, their former neighbours the Guclus came out to confront them.
"They attacked us with their Kalashnikovs as we were unloading the car," says Murat Tekin. "At first we thought they were just trying to intimidate us, but then I saw my brother go down." Five minutes later, three members of the Tekin family - including Murat's seven-year-old nephew - were dead.
"Before the war, these people were poor. War brought them wealth and power," says Sait Tanguner, a relative of the Tekins who saw the shooting. "They preferred to murder us than to give us back the houses and fields they took when we left." He looks to the brook along which Ugrak is built. "We love this place," he says, "but no land is worth dying for."
In the courtyard of the Guclu farm, a neat row of three new tractors suggests wealth uncommon in this impoverished region. Since the arrest of 10 men involved in the shootings, the farming equipment has stood silent.
Abdullah Guclu denies his family bought them with money given to them by the state to fight against the PKK. "The government never paid us anything," he says. "They just gave us guns to protect ourselves against terrorist attack."
Though he admits his family had been using Tekin property for years, he argues they had intended to hand it back. "We are sorry about what happened," he says, claiming the deaths were the result of a decades-long blood feud between the two families.
The 15-year conflict in the south-east fizzled out in 1999 with the arrest and imprisonment of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. For local experts, though, the events in Ugrak are clear evidence that the Turkish government's prosecution of the war still casts a shadow over peace in the region.
Bayram Bozyel, deputy leader of the small Kurdish party Hak- Par, says: "The continued existence of these militias is a disease that could spread to the whole social body. These men must be disarmed rapidly if the south-east is not once again to descend into total lawlessness."
For Turkey's military leaders, whose conventional tactics were ineffectual in the guerrilla war they were fighting, there were ample good reasons to recruit local militias, or village guards, as they came to be known. Nobody had closer contact with the PKK than the villagers and nobody knew better where they were hiding.
Local militias also enabled Ankara to fight its war by proxy. Experts say that of the 35,000 people killed during the conflict, a high proportion came from the ranks of the village guard.
According to Mr Besir Dogan, who earns $120 a month as chief guard in the village of Selyazi, the tactic worked well. "We came here in 1989, when there was a lot of PKK activity in the region," he says. "There are no terrorists left now."
He omits to add that in practice, the new counter-terrorist strategy meant his village was emptied of anybody unwilling to take up arms against the PKK.
Ali Kucuksoz was briefly Mr Dogan's neighbour in Selyazi, until the day in 1991 when soldiers gave him the choice between joining the militia or leaving. He chose the latter. "War was never going to benefit me," he says, "but I had no intention of profiting from it."
He hasn't been back since. After six years spent repeatedly petitioning local and national authorities to allow him back, Mr Kucuksoz has only received one reply: a refusal on the grounds that he had not used his fields for a decade.
The governor of Diyarbakir, Mr Cemil Serhadli, says there are still 60,000 guards in government pay today, but agrees that there is less use for them than in the past. He is adamant his government will not let them down. "These men are our heroes," he says. "We are working on ways to provide them with work to replace their present duties."
"I hope the government won't act too hastily," says one local journalist on condition of anonymity. "These guards are hated. Without their guns, who knows what might happen to them."