An interesting question: compare the fate of Gen Augusto Pinochet, aged 83, and Comrade "Apo" Ocalan, aged 48. Pinochet faces extradition from the UK. Ocalan, who has led the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) since its foundation 20 years ago, has waged a terroristic war in south-eastern Turkey.
Of course, he claims the usual indulgence for terrorism, but he has personally been charged with murder, in Germany, where four defectors from his organisation were killed. He is wanted on a red Interpol list, at the behest of the German government. He flew to Italy, requested political asylum and has not been made to face justice there - instead, he sits in a comfortable house near Rome.
Has the Italian state a soft spot for murderers? In 1985, Palestine Liberation Organisation men hijacked a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. An elderly, crippled tourist, in a wheelchair, berated them. He was shot, and dumped over the side, wheelchair and all. The four killers were later arrested in Italy. They "escaped" while "on leave" from prison. Now, it seems, the Italian state is at it again. It will not extradite Ocalan to Turkey. This is a strange contrast with British behaviour over Pinochet.
The problem is that Ocalan himself is hugely complicating a difficult enough situation. The PKK claims to speak for "the Kurds", and there is in some quarters an easy acceptance of this claim. But most of his victims have been Kurds.
One of his one-time lieutenants, Selim Curukkaya, wrote his memoirs. Ocalan is a Communist, complete with hammer and sickle, and he runs the PKK in Stalinist style, complete with executions and purge trials. You are not even allowed to cross your legs in his camps, says Curukkaya, as it might be taken for a sign of disrespect; he himself was imprisoned by Ocalan, and managed, with great difficulty, to get away, through Beirut. Other defectors have not been so lucky.
In 1993, Ocalan broke a ceasefire, and killed 20 unarmed young conscripts in a bus. A particularly horrible case involved two young primary schoolteachers, who had gone to the south-east out of idealism, to bring education to the backward east. They were killed. The newly-married wife of one was to be spared, but she asked to be killed as well, and the PKK obliged.
The PKK is a terroristic organisation with links to gangland and its aim is the creation of a Maoist state in areas of Turkey and Iraq. Such movements can talk the language of "national liberation", and gain credibility in serious circles. But there is not A Kurdish Question: there are several.
The Kurds have had a rather tragic history. They lived scattered among four different states, and in the recent past most were nomads. In Turkey, they are divided by religion - many are not orthodox Muslims, but Alevis, far less strict, and in the past, whenever a Kurdish rebellion occurred, they took different sides. There is also a vast linguistic divide.
According to the best anthropological account, Martin van Bruinessen's Aga, Sheikh And State, there are seven Kurdish languages, and in Turkey the speakers of the Zaza and Kurmanci variants understand each other, if at all, only with great difficulty.
In Northern Iraq, there are two chief Kurdish formations, but they, too, are divided by language. This problem is shown by the PKK's very own television station, Med-TV, which broadcasts mainly in Turkish, and otherwise mainly uses Arabic or even Iranian.
There is a further problem: children. It is still the done thing for a man to marry four times and to produce as many children as possible; there is a teenage bride to take care of the initial hormones, a further bride for the early 20s, a third for the prosperous years and a fourth for old age. This, of course, compounds the problem of poverty. According to the Turkish army, the PKK recruits are from the sons of the first marriage, embittered and with a mother who comes last in the queue for the father's favours.
Besides, millions of Kurds in Turkey have been prospering in western and even central Anatolia. According to the latest book on this, by Henry Barkey and Graham Fuller (which is not favourable to the Turkish government's position) one-third of the politicians themselves are of Kurdish origin, there are countless successful Kurdish businessmen and though the scale of the Kurdish problem is evident in the shantytown outskirts of any of the big cities of the west, there is no doubt that most Kurds just look for continued association with the Turkish state.
In any opinion poll, people will answer "Turkish" as their nationality, even where they also claim some sort of Kurdish antecedents. This is reflected in elections, where the political party associated with Kurdish rights - HADEP - gains very few votes outside the south-eastern regions. Because of the PKK terror there, many of the western Kurds fear going back.
What the answer to the Kurdish question is, I do not know. Even nationalist Turks sometimes say that there should be a Turkish-Kurdish state, a federation of the kind suggested by the late Turgut Ozal at the time of the Gulf War, as an alternative to the survival of Saddam Hussein. Others say that the answer must be decentralisation, which, again, is not senseless. Many observers just think that assimilation should go ahead, and will do so.
Whatever the answer, this is not a situation where you can automatically apply minority statutes. The Turkish republic has done, overall, a pretty remarkable job of "modernisation". The average age on death of an adult male is now almost 70, whereas in Russia it is 54. Not many Kurds wish to throw this away for the sake of the PKK's flyblown variant of Che Guevara's romantic agony. By giving aid and comfort to this murderer, the Italian government has behaved contemptibly.
Norman Stone, formerly professor of modern history at Oxford, is professor of international relations at Bilkent University, Ankara