TURKEY: The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has threatened to resume its fight against Turkish security forces on February 15th unless the prison conditions of its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan are improved.
In a January interview with Belgium-based Kurdish-language Medya TV from a mountain base in northern Iraq, the PKK leader's brother and deputy Mr Osman Ocalan accused Turkey of trying to provoke renewed conflict.
"Our leader is being treated with unprecedented atrocity", he said. "This policy of isolation constitutes a war."
The sole inmate of an island prison off Istanbul since 1999, Ocalan has never been permitted telephone conversations with lawyers and family guaranteed by Turkish legislation. Since November 27th last year, however, his isolation has been increased by the Turkish authorities' refusal to allow his lawyers once-weekly access to him.
Turkey blames dangerous conditions on the small land-locked Sea of Marmara.
"Absurd", says Mr Selahattin Demirtas, a human rights lawyer in Diyarbakir, capital of Turkey's majority Kurdish south-east. "So NATO's second largest army can't even get a lawyer across a pond once a week?"
Visits to the island had been fixed for Wednesdays, but lawyers say their requests to change the day have received no response.
Refusal of access began the same day Turkey's new Justice and Development Party (AKP) government received its parliamentary vote of confidence, leading to suspicions that AKP may be less progressive than its pro-European rhetoric suggests.
But Mr Celal Baslangic, an expert on Kurdish affairs with the Radikal newspaper, thinks this is a ploy by ultra-secularist members of Turkey's establishment to destabilise a government they suspect of Islamist leanings.
"Ocalan should be the responsibility of the Justice Ministry", he says, "but I think he's in the hands of the \ chief of staff."
Others see a link between Ocalan's isolation and preparations for war in neighbouring Iraq.
"Almost all the PKK's 5,000 fighters are now in northern Iraq", says Mr Bayram Bozyel, Diyarbakir chairman of the small Kurdish party Hak-Par. "If they declare war, Turkey has a perfect excuse to invade."
An estimated 2,000 Turkish troops have been in northern Iraq since 1996, co-operating with Kurdish authorities there in their fight against the PKK.
But with Washington pressuring Turkey to allow it to open up a northern front against Baghdad, Turkish ministers privately say up to 120,000 Turkish troops could accompany US forces into Iraq.
Turkey insists its role will be limited to protecting possible refugees and preventing Iraq's Kurds from using war to declare independence. Not everybody is convinced, though.
"If Turkey attacks the PKK under cover of war, many Turkish Kurds would be dismayed", says Mr Demirtas.
At a press conference after talks with the Turkish Foreign Ministry last Friday, the US president's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, Mr Zalmai Khalilzad, warned that "any military movement and combat [in Iraq] would have to be under the overall command of the coalition."
The PKK began its separatist war against the Turkish state in 1984, reducing its demands to cultural autonomy in 1993. By 1999, when Ocalan called a ceasefire following his arrest and trial on charges of treason, at least 37,000 people had died in the fighting.