Turkey's Kurds Guns and votes / Pre-election tension is rising among the Kurds of Turkey's south-east

A GOLD-PLATED pistol in one hand, worry beads in the other, Hazim Babat sits at the foot of the mountain range that separates Turkey from Iraq and contemplates war. He is the chieftain of the Babat clan, which is fighting alongside the Turkish armed forces against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) separatist guerrillas.

For years the Babats hunted PKK militants in Iraq with the help of Peshmerga warriors from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) from northern Iraq, led by Massoud Barzani. “The PKK slaughtered our women, our babies, they are going to pay the price,” vows Mr Babat.

But times have changed and the Kurds are beginning to unite, wherever they live. Nowhere is this truer than in northern Iraq where, with American support, as many as 4m Kurds have come closer to achieving full-blown independence than ever before. Mr Barzani, who runs the Kurdish-controlled enclave, declares that the days of Kurdish fratricide are over. He refuses to let Turkish soldiers overrun his territory in order to attack the PKK. “Turkey's real problem”, Mr Barzani opined recently, “is that the Kurds exist at all.”

Despite its repeated calls for cross-border action against the PKK, the army's real target may be the quasi-independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq. The generals see an independent Kurdish state as an existential threat because it would stoke separatist passions among Turkey's 14m-odd Kurds. They are “willing to prevent its emergence no matter the price”, asserts Ibrahim Guclu, a veteran Kurdish politician. “Yet the harder they push, the closer together they drive the Iraqi and Turkish Kurds,” he adds.

Mindful of America's opposition and of Kurdish votes, Turkey's mildly Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has ruled out any incursion, at least before the general election on July 22nd. Yet Turkish forces continue to mass along the Iraqi border. The beefed-up army presence is palpable in Sirnak, one of three border provinces in which no-go “security zones” have been declared. Turkish soldiers in armoured personnel-carriers point guns at passers-by. Attack helicopters clatter overhead. In the regional capital of Diyarbakir, your correspondent counted no fewer than nine F-16 fighter jets screeching towards Sirnak within the space of 20 minutes. The PKK is hitting back, murdering soldiers and civilians alike.

Ayla Akat, a human-rights lawyer who is standing for election in Batman for the pro-Kurdish Democratic Turkey Party (DTP), concedes that the violence is fuelling anti-Kurdish feelings throughout Turkey. She points to the attempted lynching this month of two Kurdish seasonal workers in the western province of Sakarya. Yet if the government were to accept the PKK's demands to ease restrictions on the Kurdish language, offer amnesty to PKK fighters and allow their leaders to seek asylum in Europe, “the Kurdish problem would be solved”, she says. “Is anyone talking about independence?”

In 2005, emboldened by the European Union's decision to open membership talks, Mr Erdogan explored a possible deal that would accommodate the Iraqi Kurds too. But he was forced to back off under pressure from the army. In the same year Mr Erdogan became the first Turkish leader ever to admit that the state had made “mistakes” in dealing with the Kurds. His words cemented his Justice and Development (AK) Party, whose Islamic credentials play well with millions of pious Kurds, as the DTP's main rival in the south-east.

“My people are going to vote for Erdogan because he wants the European Union, and EU membership is the panacea for separatism,” says Cemil Oter, a tribal leader who has lost 40 men to the PKK. But hopes of membership are fading as EU bigwigs, led by France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, lobby against Turkish entry. EU-inspired reforms that helped to win Turkey its prized date for membership talks are being quietly rolled back.

The effects are being felt in Diyarbakir, where a local mayor and his entire council were barred from office last week for using Kurdish as well as Turkish to communicate with their constituents. Abdullah Demirbas had already annoyed the authorities by erecting a monument in memory of Ahmet Kaymaz, a Kurdish lorry driver, and his 12-year-old son, who were gunned down outside their home in the town of Kiziltepe in 2004 on the grounds that they were “terrorists”.

All four members of the special forces who were implicated in the killings were exonerated by a court in April, proving that “there is rarely justice for the Kurds”, says Tahir Elci, a lawyer who defended the Kaymaz family. Mr Elci is now facing up to three years in prison for criticising the court. Meanwhile, reports of torture have risen sharply, because new regulations allow detainees to be denied access to a lawyer during the first 24 hours of interrogation by police.

All these things help to swell PKK ranks. The trouble is that the rebels' new tactics—setting off landmines and planting explosives—have caught the army off guard. Abdullah Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, revealed last week that security forces seized two tonnes of plastic explosives smuggled by the PKK from Iraq in 2006 alone. Mr Gul said that “making compromises over democracy in the name of fighting terrorism” was “a trap that should not be contemplated”. But with each Turkish soldier killed fighting the PKK, Turks' enthusiasm for democracy, and for the EU, gets harder to preserve.