TURKEY:TURKEY'S MOST famous transsexual has gone on trial in Istanbul for alienating people from the military, a crime punishable by up to three years jail.
With her bee-stung lips and long permed black hair, crooner Bulent Ersoy is no stranger to controversy. She was banned from the screen by a 1980s junta which saw her as a bad influence.
Her latest troubles stem from remarks she made this February during a broadcast of the hugely popular Popstar Alaturka questioning Turkey's deeply ingrained militarism.
"I am not a mother, nor ever will be, but I would not bury my child for someone else's war," she said.
Her remarks coincided with a major incursion by the country's conscript army on Kurdish separatist bases in northern Iraq, and visibly shocked her fellow presenters.
"May God give me a son so that I can send him off to our glorious army," Ebru Gundes said, adding a nationalistic phrase repeated without fail at every military funeral.
"Martyrs never die, the fatherland cannot be divided."
However, Ersoy was not put off. "Always the same cliched phrases," she riposted. "Children go, bitter tears, funerals . . . and afterwards, these cliched phrases."
Of the 40,000 people who have died since 1984 in the war between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Turkish state, roughly 5,000 have been soldiers. Hundreds of soldiers have died since a weakened PKK broke a five-year ceasefire in 1999.
While Ersoy, who has since stood by her remarks, was not present at the hearing on Tuesday, several of the 10 men whose complaints triggered the investigation were.
"She spoke out against the indivisible nature of our country", said Savas Altay, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Turkish flag and a blue military beret.
In his indictment, the prosecutor wrote that "in a democracy . . . starting a debate . . . is not crime", but Ersoy's words, he added, amounted to deliberate propaganda against the military.
Attitudes like this are common in a country where debating the role of the military is perhaps the deepest taboo.
From an early age, Turkish schoolchildren are taught that "all Turks are born soldiers". Textbooks warn that a man who has not done his military service "cannot be useful to himself."
Unrecognised by the law, Turkey's 80-odd conscientious objectors face a potentially infinite round of trial and imprisonment.
Yet there have been growing signs recently of that Turkey's Kurdish policy has reached a dead end. In 2006, the mother of one conscript soldier killed while fighting the PKK sparked intense debate when she broke military funeral protocol by refusing to say "long live this country".
"I didn't bring up my son to be a soldier, and I do not accept his death," Neriman Okay said. "He died for nothing."
In a path-breaking book published late last year, four retired chiefs-of-staff admitted that outlawing Kurdish in the 1980s and reducing the Kurdish issue to an issue of terrorism had been a mistake.
Last month, the government announced a €7.6 billion investment project for the impoverished Kurdish southeast. Yet addressing the ethnic side of the Kurdish issue is still largely blocked by official Turkish ideology's insistence on a unitary state.
A former adviser to a mould-breaking Turkish leader who tried to initiate talks with the PKK in the early 1990s, Cengiz Candar doubts the killing will end any time soon.
"The Kurdish problem is an ethnic problem," he says. "The PKK may eventually wither away, but unless you accept it as such, it's not going to go away."