The Turkish national anthem sounds a little out of place in the mouths of the Kurdish villagers of Yigityolu. This week, the military, press and Emergency Zone Governor have descended on this tiny hamlet 75 miles from the Syrian border on the scrub plains of Turkey's conflict-ridden south-east.
On every rooftop within a mile, soldiers finger automatic weapons, and as the portly governor, Mr Aydin Arslan, makes his way between the ramshackle buildings he is squeezed between heavily armed body guards. "This is just security for my visit," he says. "There is no support among these people for the PKK. There isn't a Kurdish problem in our region, but a terrorism problem."
The brass band strikes up and the governor shovels a spadeful of concrete to lay the foundations of a new school. The army's new role as a benevolent giant stretching out a tender hand to the impoverished Kurds aims to cut the support on the ground from under the PKK. It is classic counter-insurgency. But while the army may win hearts and minds here, its policy between 1992-95, which saw some 3,000 villages in this region emptied, has left lasting scars.
"The day the soldiers came to empty our village, they stripped us naked and beat us," says Ms Iffet Mutaf (40), speaking in her native Kurdish, a language banned in schools and all public institutions. It is from among Kurdish villagers like her - rounded up from their farms and corralled into the south-east's major cities: cities such as Diyarbakir - that the Kurdish Workers' Party and its leader, Mr Abdullah Ocalan, find greatest support.
The 14-year war between the separatist PKK and the Turkish army has cost an estimated 30,000 lives and so tarnished Turkey's human rights record that it is now a major obstacle to entry into the European Union. In Turkey's capital, Ankara, the third floor of a police station has been given over to the Mothers of the Martyrs, an organisation for people like Ms Gulsen Ones whose husband, a policeman, was killed in 1981 by a 16-year-old PKK guerrilla. Her two children have had to grow up fatherless.
"When I sent my three year-old boy to primary school," she says, "he always painted pictures of graveyards, so I had to send him for psychotherapy. Now I want to ask those who talk about human rights: how about our human rights, my children's rights, and how about my husband's life?"
It's human rights day in Turkey, and while the country is not winning any awards, its human rights association is honouring doctors who saved the life of its leading campaigner. In May this year, Mr Akin Birdal was hit by six bullets in an assassination attempt. In answer to Ms Ones's demand he says he wants human rights for all, but he sees the Kurdish issue and the constitution that outlaws advocacy of anything but a unified Turkish state as central to the country's sorry rights record.
"The main reasons for human rights violations are the legal and constitutional structure here," he says. "They are based on the 1982 constitution put in place after the military coup in 1980. We want Turkey to be in line with the international conventions and declarations she has signed up to." But just as soldiers still guard the mausoleum to the country's founder, Kemal Ataturk, so the military still acts as the guardians of his vision in Turkish politics. It was his dream that the ethnic divisions that unravelled the Ottoman Empire not dog the secular state he founded in 1923.
Those suggesting a political answer, such as the leader of the party, Hadep - which claims to democratically embrace the Kurdish issue - can fall victim to the draconian constitution and be arrested. With Hadep's leader in jail, the deputy director of the party, Mr Osman Oscelik, suggested that were Turkey more democratic, support for the PKK would fall away. However, according to an international relations professor at Ankara University and a lecturer at the National Security College, the authorities in Turkey feel too insecure to trust the democratic route. "If we can build confidence in Turkey then perhaps there can be more democratic solution possible," Prof Hassan Kroni says.
That will come, he says, only after entry into Europe - ironically, without a solution to the Kurdish issue, that is unlikely to happen. In the meantime many Kurds will continue to place all their hope in Mr Ocalan and the PKK. According to commentators it will not be until the military cease their meddling in Turkish politics that the Kurdish question will be addressed politically.