A plan by Abdullah Akin, the mayor of Batman in south-east Turkey, to change some of his town's street names seemed pretty unremarkable at first glance.
But Mr Akin's choices, which included imaginative constructions like Mahatma Gandhi Street, Democracy Avenue and Human Rights Boulevard, proved too much for the Turkish government.
The Ankara-appointed provincial governor objected, and last week a court ruled that since Gandhi's name was associated with passive resistance to a colonial power and glorified revolt, it could not be used. The same went for 14 of Mr Akin's other seemingly innocent choices.
The court added, for good measure, that streets in Batman must not be given Kurdish names. And therein lies the explanation for the Kurdish mayor's difficulties - and one of several reasons why Turkey's bid to join the European Union, due to be set out in detail by the Ankara government this month, faces some very big obstacles.
So insecure is the Turkish government about its grip on the predominantly Kurdish areas of the south-east, where most of the country's estimated 12m Kurds live, that it continues to stamp down hard on any manifestation of a separate Kurdish identity. Officially, the Kurds are not recognised as Kurds at all, but as Turkish citizens.
Despite a change of tone under the government of Bulent Ecevit, restrictions on broadcasting and teaching in the Kurdish language remain in force. More broadly, attempts to assert Kurdish "cultural rights" or pursue political self-determination bring a routinely harsh response.
At the heart of Ankara's insecurity is the separatist movement spearheaded by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The war with the PKK has cost an estimated 30,000 lives since 1984.
The PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999, and renounced its previous demands for a separate Kurdish state in favour of enhanced cultural freedoms.
But the government has not taken the PKK at its word and the Turkish army continues to mount counter-insurgency operations that not infrequently take its troops into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
Prosecutions of suspected PKK sympathisers have not ceased either, whoever they may be. Earlier this week, the Turkish authorities in Diyarbakir, near Batman, said they would charge 13 juveniles, including one nine-year-old, with "aiding and abetting" the PKK.
The youths' "crime" was allegedly to shout pro-PKK slogans. Their families say they have been tortured while in detention. If found guilty, they face up to seven years in jail.
The infringement of freedoms and rights considered sacrosanct by EU countries and international bodies is not confined to Turkey's Kurds.
The Turkish government is also at war with militant groups such as the Revolutionary People's Liberation Front and the Islamist faction, Hizbullah.
The leftwing RPLF were responsible for a suicide bomb attack that killed a policeman earlier this month. The group said it had acted in revenge for the violent storming by the Turkish army in December of 20 prisons where inmates were on hunger strike. At least 30 prisoners died.
Hizbullah, which shares the aims of the Iranian-backed group of the same name, is equally reviled by the government (and by many Kurds). It advocates the creation of an Islamic state in predominantly Muslim, but traditionally secular Turkey. Hizbullah is suspected of being behind the latest upsurge in violence - the ambush and killing of Diyarbakir's police chief and five policemen on Wednesday.
The crackdown on Islamists has in effect been going on since February 1997, when the army conspired to oust the government led by Necmettin Erbakan of the Islamist Welfare party. Welfare has been a banned organisation since 1998 and legal moves are afoot to ban Virtue, another Islamist party.
"The process (launched in 1997) will continue for 1,000 years if need be," the chief of Turkey's general staff, Huseyin Kivrikoglu, said recently. The military, backed by rightwing elements within the governing coalition, is meanwhile pushing for a purge from government service of suspected Islamist sympathisers.
Even in Turkish society at large, the penal code restricts freedoms of speech and publication taken for granted elsewhere. Prosecutions of journalists, academics and others who breach these regulations are commonplace.
This week, a demonstration was mounted in Ankara in support of the Anatolia news agency after it was accused by the government of being too informative in its reporting of a high-level government corruption case.
Batman was also in the news after a radio station that played a Kurdish song, entitled I Am Wounded, was ordered off the air for 90 days.
The suppression of Kurdish rights, the sometimes violent crackdowns and repression levelled at the left and right, the interference of the military in politics, the disregard for political pluralism, the restrictions on free speech, and a pattern of disrespect, bordering on contempt, for basic human rights are all issues that are certain to bedevil, and possibly scupper, Mr Ecevit's hopes of getting Turkey into the EU.
Add to that this week's furious row with France over its condemnation of the 1915 Armenian massacres as "genocide", Turkey's disputes with Greece and Cyprus and its fragile economic situation, and Turkey's EU accession begins to look like an ever more distant prospect.
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