Turkey's Achilles heel is its treatment of its Kurdish minority. Nicholas Birch reports from the south-east where landlords still wield medieval power.
As preparations for a possible war in Iraq continue, Turkey's leaders have repeatedly warned that the growing autonomy of the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq could act as a red rag to their own majority Kurdish south-east.
In Agilli, a village 40 miles east of the regional capital Diyarbakir, village headman Veysi Celik (48), thinks Ankara has missed the point. "Our problem is land," he says, "not what's happening in northern Iraq."
Like many who work the fertile hills around the valley of the Tigris, the 300-plus villagers of Agilli are tenant farmers, dependent for their livelihood on land lent to them by the local landlord, or agha, and paying him 10 per cent of their earnings in return.
According to Mr Celik, only 50 people in the village now have work. "If everybody had fields," he says, "there would have been no need for so many to take up guns."
He should know. For three years, he worked as a government-armed militiaman or village guard, paid to protect the village from PKK incursions. Poverty and the threat of being forced from his village, he says, forced him to accept the monthly salary of $100.
People in Agilli are still frightened, so much so that at their request, I am not using the village's real name. Agilli is just my name for it.
Now that its 15-year war against the Turkish state has ended, the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party, is remembered primarily as a violent advocate of Kurdish independence. Where it differed from earlier Kurdish rebel groups, though, was in its attempts to win the support of what its Marxist cadres called the "oppressed rural classes". Its founding programme in 1977 called for land to be shared among poor peasants.
Aghas, not surprisingly, were at the top of its hit list.
"The war changed the balance of power around here," says villager Irfan Ekin (42). "In my father's time, we were terrified of the agha, now we feel as though we exist. He even offers us cigarettes."
Down in the provincial town of Bismil, though, it is clear that the basic structures are still the same. The drab offices of the chamber of agriculture may not look much, but they are the mainstay of the Aslan family's considerable influence in the region.
"My family has run the chamber since it opened," says Tahsin Aslan (44), next in line to be agha. "It's the mechanism by which farmers' problems are transferred to central authority." He gestures behind him to shelves of thick blue folders. "Petitions," he explains.
"Farmers with less than 40 hectares of land are entitled to $65 per hectare from the World Bank, but they have to pass through us to get their money." In a region where many farmers find it difficult to afford seed for their fields, aid is vital. However in practice, local critics say, the system serves only to strengthen the client network centred around the Aslans.
"Records of land ownership around here are inaccurate or non-existent, partially because many of the villages used to belong to Armenians expelled in 1915," says one local teacher who asked to remain anonymous. "As a result, chamber of agriculture bosses can twist the figures in favour of their friends, often big landlords like themselves. Of course, they take their cut too."
Mr Aslan admits that the scarcity of land deeds causes problems, but says these usually involve "small farmers claiming land lent them by their landlord as their own". "These," he adds, "are easy to deal with."
"In rural areas like Bismil, aghas are more powerful even than the governors flown down from Ankara," says the teacher. "Small farmers have little choice but to join their networks."
The power of aghas in south-east Turkey dates from Ottoman times, when they were allowed to run semi-autonomous principalities in return for pledges of loyalty and military aid. After the suppression of a series of agha-led rebellions in the mid-1920s, Turkey's new leaders did the same.
"It proved safer than breaking the agha system up," writes Svente Cornell, a specialist at the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute in Washington in the quarterly Orbis - and a cost-effective way of achieving political control over a restive and remote region.
While Mr Aslan's father is the district head of an Islamist party with only limited support in the region, more powerful aghas can convert local influence into near hereditary parliamentary seats.
Despite the new Turkish government's pledge to combat corruption, Irfan Ekin in Agilli doubts it will be able to change the status quo. "Aghas bend with the political wind," he says. "Ours campaigned vigorously for the party that won last month's election."
The only difference, he adds, is that "he now knows he cannot buy our support. And too bad for the government aid that would have come if we had voted with him."
Such structures not only sound medieval, analysts say, they also contribute to the south-east's chronic poverty. "There is no doubt," writes Svente Cornell, "that tribal leaders have an interest in slowing development, which weakens the traditional social structures on which their power depends."
While the region urgently needs local development, "the government must take measures to ensure that development affects the entire region and not just tribal leaders who own most of the land and industry". Failure could "provide the spark for a social explosion."
Irfan Ekin denies the situation is critical. "We, the state and the PKK have had enough of fighting," he says. But his nephew, Selahattin (31), is less sure.
"The government is full of promises and empty of action," he says. "If something is not done rapidly to improve the lives of people in this region, I think fighting will break out again."