By Benjamin Harvey

As the sun rose over the southern city Gaziantep one summer morning, Selahattin Sezgin, 22, decided it was time to kill his sister.

The 16-year-old girl was unmarried and pregnant - and that was enough to seal her fate. While his neighbours slept, Sezgin pulled out a pump-action shotgun and fired it into her chest and head, a murder for which he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

But to many in Turkey, he is not a criminal.

"If a girl lays with a man or cheats, her mother won't want her," said Abdulkerim Aslan, an unemployed 47-year-old Istanbul resident. "It brings shame on the family. Either the girl has to leave, or the stain has to be cleaned."

Turkey's longstanding quest to join the European Union has entailed dramatic and sometimes wrenching changes: greater civil liberties, painful economic reforms, a crackdown on corruption. But the practice Turks call Honor killings has proved one of the most difficult to eradicate, despite tough new laws enacted under pressure from Brussels.

The issue is complicated by the fact that the murders are associated mainly with the Kurdish minority - which the EU and human rights groups view as victims of oppressive policies by the Turkish state.

Brussels has been sympathetic to Kurdish demands that Turkey grant them more cultural freedoms. But many of Turkey's image problems - the perception that it tolerates backward practices at odds with the West -stem from the Kurds' fiercely guarded clan-based way of life.

To some Kurds, the government's efforts to satisfy the Europeans over Honor killings is just another example of interference by an overbearing Turkish state.

"This comes from our ancestors," said Mehmet Yolac said, claiming Honor killings as a Kurdish tradition as he ironed a pair of pants in his tailoring shop in the largely Kurdish Istanbul neighbourhood of Esentepe. He added proudly: "We're passionate about our Honor."

According to the rigid Honor code embraced by Kurds like Sezgin, a man is judged not only by his actions but by the fidelity and chastity of the women in his life.

That viewpoint is not unique to Kurds. A study published in March by Bosporus University professor Hakan Yilmaz found that men across Turkey define their Honor by their wife's chastity more than anything else.

But it is within the Kurds' patriarchal social structure that such attitudes are taken most seriously - and most often spill into violence.

Kurds from the southeast have been migrating by the tens of thousands into Western cities like Istanbul, bringing with them village traditions that put them in conflict with the part of the country that is self-consciously pushing itself to be more liberal, more open, more European.

Feleknas Uca, a Kurdish member of the European Parliament, believes that ending the killings and becoming more "European" requires Turkey to address the problems of its Kurdish population in a deep and fundamental way - to inculcate them into the ways of the West.

One obstacle may be the deep distrust that meets even the best of Turkish intentions. For decades, Kurds have complained of discrimination, and they have suffered through more than two decades of fighting between autonomy-seeking Kurdish guerrillas and Turkish forces.

The government has acted aggressively to legitimise violence against women.

It revamped the penal code in 2005 so men can no longer claim they were provoked to kill by a woman's immorality, and imposed life sentences for Honor killings regardless of the murderer's age - to prevent family members from forcing a younger son to commit the crime and be tried as a minor.

But the sense of obligation to maintain Honor is so deeply ingrained among Kurds that even the harshest penalties are unlikely to be a deterrent. There are often reports of men crying over the dead body of a daughter or sister, wailing that they were forced to carry out the slaying.

Recently, families have taken to finding other ways to achieve the same end: pressuring the girl to kill herself. Such suicides are now regular occurrences in parts of eastern Turkey, though precise statistics are unavailable because records are poor and families often disguise the deaths.

There has been rash of forced suicides in the southeastern city of Batman, population 250 000; the UN has recorded at least three dozen there so far in 2006.

Precise figures on the proportion of Honor killings committed by Kurds are unavailable because Turkey does not recognise the Kurds as a distinct ethnic minority. But police statistics indicate the killings are largely a Kurdish phenomenon.

Though they make up an estimated 20 percent of Turkey's population, 43 percent of the crimes police classified as Honor killings from 2000-2005 occurred in the east or southeast of the country, where Kurds are predominant. Of the remaining Honor killings committed in the west, 45 percent were committed by people who were originally from the east or southeast.

Nebahat Akkoc, a Kurdish woman who founded the Ka-Mer women's centre headquartered in Diyarbakir, Turkey's largest Kurdish-majority city, said it would take time to change attitudes toward Honor killings.

"The laws changed fast here," she said. "The problem is that efforts to change the mentality have been very insufficient."

Sapa-AP