Turkey:Turkey's deep-felt fear is that Iraqi Kurdistan's increased freedoms could act as a red rag to restive Turkish Kurds, writes Nicholas Birchin Yuksekova, southeast Turkey.
As preparations build up for a full-scale military campaign against PKK bases in northern Iraq, many in Turkey would like to see the army going after Iraqi Kurdish leaders too.
When Ertugrul Ozkok, editor of Turkey's most influential newspaper, wrote a column last week giving "a last warning" to Iraqi Kurdish leaders that "you can either be our neighbour or our target", Turkey's top general told him "your article today was very important . . . That is the correct diagnosis." Television programmes, meanwhile, are full of threats of operations against Iraqi Kurdish militias.
The justification given for such threats is that Iraqi Kurds have not done enough to limit PKK activity on their territory. But they are also the latest expression of Turkey's deeply-felt fear that Iraqi Kurdistan's increased freedoms could act as a red rag to restive Turkish Kurds.
On the face of it, that fear seems justified. Five years ago, many Turkish Kurds had little but contempt for Iraqi Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masud Barzani. "Backward tribesmen", people in tea-houses across mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey jeered, "interested in nothing but dollars from Washington." That contempt, now, has entirely evaporated.
Instead of insults, many Turkish Kurds prefix mentions of Talabani and Barzani with the word "brej" - a Kurdish expression of respect.
"If Barzani told people here to vote for me at the next municipal elections, they would," says Irfan Sari, head of a tradesman's chamber in Yuksekova, a town 40km north of Turkey's border with Iraq.
One reason for the change lies in the changing relationship between the PKK and Iraqi Kurdish parties. In the 1990s, both sides lost hundreds in savage fighting. The head of the Iraq-based pro-Barzani satellite TV station Kurdistan TV, Garwent Akrayi, says one of the main reasons it was set up in 1999 was "to combat the endless negative coverage of our leaders" on pro-PKK satellite stations.
Now, both sides leave each other well enough alone. Mutual media coverage has become correspondingly more positive.
But a far more significant reason for Turkish Kurds' newly-found enthusiasm for their Iraqi Kurdish cousins lies in the attitude of their own state.
Turkey was ferociously opposed to Iraqi Kurdish autonomy before Saddam Hussein was toppled, and remains so today. Since a referendum in November 2005, Iraq has officially been a federal state, and Baghdad recognises Mesut Barzani as head of the Kurdistan regional government.
Ankara, meanwhile, refers to Iraqi Kurdistan as "northern Iraq" and refuses to talk to its leaders.
Its allergy to any form of Kurdish contact has, if anything, increased as negotiations with Iraq over the PKK get more intense. When a delegation from Baghdad arrived in Ankara this weekend for talks with Turkish authorities, two Kurdish representatives were only let in on the insistence of the head of the Iraqi delegation.
"They were made to share the same hotel bedroom," jeered one Istanbul-based newspaper.
Turkish Kurds find this aggressive tone offensive. "I don't like [ Iraqi president] Talabani personally," says one journalist in Yuksekova. "But when I see the Turkish media insulting him, calling him 'arrogant' or 'a Middle Eastern belly-dancer', I interpret that not as an insult aimed at him personally, but at me and other Kurds this side of the border."
Others throughout Turkey's southeast whisper that if Turkish troops attack Iraqi Kurdish militias they will join the PKK.
Ankara's stance is "pushing Kurds together and deepening the rift between Kurds and Turks", says Sezgin Tanrikulu, Bar Association head in Diyarbakir, the Turkish southeast's largest city. "Wounds are being created that will not be easy to heal."
Some Kurds point to the change in attitudes as a forewarning of a possible future split. If the per capita income of Iraqi Kurds rises even one dollar above that of Turkish Kurds, they say, the latter will want to join them.
But this is a minority view. Despite their enthusiastic interest in Iraqi Kurdish autonomy, most Turkish Kurds remain sceptical. The thousands of them who work in Iraq, or have visited it, complain of conservatism, rampant corruption and limited democracy there.
Above all, Turkish Kurds say, they are far too embedded in Turkish life to want to break off now.
"Who do people in Yuksekova marry if it's not their neighbour?" Irfan Sari asks. "Turks, not Iraqi Kurds." At a local nightclub, youngsters sing along to Turkish songs. Local businessmen divide their time between here and Istanbul.
Nobody puts the point more bluntly than Maaruf Ataoglu, Turkish Kurdish owner of a chain of restaurants in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan.
"I may dream I was born American, but who would want to be born an Iraqi?" he asks.
"If you had the choice between a country on its way to the European Union and one stuck in the Middle East, which would you take? Like every single Turkish Kurd, you'd choose Turkey."