TROUBLE in Turkey? All aboard for Midnight Express. What damage that film has done. It is regularly shown on British television, and has impregnated the mind of a whole generation, to the point at which Turkey is permanently on the defensive - her police villified, her courts regarded as kangaroo, even her children as rather on the fat side.

This is currently being reflected in the reporting of the Abdullah Ocalan affair. He will not get a fair trial and the police - large chaps with large moustaches will beat him up in the dead of night in his Island prison on the Sea of Marmara; will he even be buggered? (Midnight Express, passim). The Europarliament will have its stalwarts -Pauline Green, as it happens, is an ex-policewoman- who will sound off: this is no way to treat minorities fighting for their rights. Who knows, the Council of Europe may be next, volunteering its judges to make sure that Ocalan has 'a fair trial'. These judges might include the Czech one who left France in 1948 to go back to liberated, socialist Prague, or maybe it will be the Georgian. And there , is also Harold Pinter, lecturing away about Kurdish rights as previously he has lectured us about the Sandinistas (whose sinister connections are laid out in Vladimir Bukovsky's Jugement a Moscou, based on Politburo records).

So far the tenor of British comment on matters Kurdish and Turkish has been a statesmanlike, 'Yes, Ocalan is a terrorist, he kills children' and so forth; 'but on the other hand' . . . that fatal British 'on the other hand', which you know is going to offer you a poison pill. Harold Pinter tells us that the Kurds are oppressed. They do not have the right to use their own language. Talk Kurdish, and into clink you go. Leyla Zana, a rather good-looking Kurdish woman with long legs and black tresses, is in prison for 15 years for just wanting to be free. There are writers banged up for the same length of time. There has even been 'ethnic cleansing claims' Le Monde in an editorial. Kurdish villages have been destroyed, the inhabitants cleared off.

The Turks are getting quite angry with this sort of thing. Ocalan is a very nasty piece of work and the PKK, far from being a movement for national liberation, is actually a Maoist affair, rather similar to Sendero Luminoso. Its specialities included drug-running -when Ocalan was seeking refuge in Belorussia, he could apparently offer 1,000 million dollars- and it massacred entire families, tiny children and all, in order to intimidate the many Kurds who took the side of the Turkish state. There were organisations in London and a lady called Julie Flint who claimed that these acts were carried out by the Turkish army. However, since Ocalan's own lieutenant, Sakik, was captured and confessed, we now know that there was never any truth in those claims. No doubt Ocalan himself will soon confirm this.

Yet we are told by the Pinters that the Kurds are a people fighting Bravehearht-fashion for their freedom. London has seen these demonstrations; as have many other European cities. Word in some Nato circles is that Kosovo is only the start: if the Albanians are to be freed, so must the Kurds. In fact, a Kurdistan might just enable us to replace Saddam Hussein's Iraq with a whole new country, a sort of Mesopotamia rediviva.

There may very well be a case for a Kurdish entity in northem Iraq. But it is Turkey, which has a free media, that is exposed to criticism for her handling of the Kurdish question. Two points need to be made. First, two- thirds of the Kurds now live in western and central Anatolia and they do not vote for the political party, Hadep, which claims to speak for Kurds. In the past week, with Turkish nationalist feeling running high, there have been very few incidents of Turkish-Kurdish conflict. We might see some instances of urban terrorism when the Ocalan trial gets underway; the PKK's publicity machine in the West will be working overtirne. Television was, on the whole, quite sympathetic to those crowds who gathered outside and inside the Greek embassy last week. We shall see.

But there is another, important point. The Kurds are not Kosovo. Leaving aside the legal argument, that Kosovo is a constitutional entity, there has been almost no intermarriage between Serbs and Albanians, whereas intermarriage between Turks and Kurds (though not, for some reason, between Kurds and Arabs) is frequent. Ocalan himself was saying after his capture that his mother was a Turk. Besides, there is an all-important question: Kosovo speaks Albanian, but in 'Kurdistan' there are several languages, which are not mutually intelligible. This is why 'Kurdish culture' is a concept very difficult to translate into reality.

The word from Mr Pinter is that Kurdish culture is suppressed, that in the end Ocalan stands for something worthier than himself. But just look at the demonstrators. They read a Turkish newspaper, called Free Agenda. Interviewed on CNN from Germany, they speak Turkish. Their own forcign-based television station uses mainly Turkish, and, where not, Iranian or Arabic. British viewers might be slightly puzzled to see the demonstrators, in their trainers, doing that rum line-dance: It is an Anatolian and Balkan one, and yet it is now supposed to represent Kurdish culture. So is the funny Geronimo ululation that they stage. Have you seen the fat ladies with beaded head-coverings going on hunger strike? You can bet that, cameras removed, they light up: I have not heard of a single one carrying on the hunger strike for more than a few hours. Kurds do not have a unified culture: they are pre-national. One authority claims that there are 28 different languages masquerading as a unified Kurdish tongue. If a Kurdistan were created, the main language, North Kirmanci, would have to be imposed by force. There is a further problem in that Turkey's Kurds are divided by religion. About a third of them are not Sunni but Alevi, a variant of Islam that is in some ways quite close to Christianity, in that 1 wine plays its part, while men and women are not segregated. These Alevi Kurds are concentrated in Zaza-speaking areas and do not seem to work well with the Sunnis from elsewhere.

It is, incidentally, just not true that you cannot buy Kurdish periodicals in Turkey , or listen to Kurdish music. The problem is that no one bothers to read the stuff, which is why those London demonstrators can be seen reading a Turkish newspaper. As time goes by, some sort of Kurdish culture may emerge, but the far greater likelihood, at least as far as the Kurds of Turkey are concemed, is further assimilation. This has already gone a long way . I do not understand why the Turkish foreign ministry does not parade to foreigners the endless numbers of Kurds who are in high places in politics, business, the army, and whose identification with the Turkish state is 100 per cent.

It is difficult to decide what Turkey should do about the Kurdish question. But -and it would have been a kindness on the part of Mr Pinter to recognise this- the Turks are good guys. Their state works quite well. Their capture of Ocalan has been elegant: no one killed, 'Kurds' attacking Greek embassies rather than Turkish ones. if you are a Turk, life can be on the hard side, but Turkey is the only state between Graz and Seoul that works in a civilised manner. The place has done quite well since it was established in 1922, after defeating Lloyd George (no one else ever managed that). The economy was about a third the size of Sweden's a quarter-century ago, and is now bigger than Sweden's; the men live out their three-score-and-ten instead of tuming up their toes, Soviet- fashion, at 50. With all her problems, modern Turkey has been rather a success story, and my own observation over the past four years shows that the large number of foreigners here have a great deal of affection and respect for the country. In fact I have never been in a country where foreigners are generally nice about the natives.

Turkey is full of character , and I have a lot of time for my students in particular. In a world of great confusion, it is a stable and increasingly prosperous place, and though the police do occasionally overdo things, this happens far less than it used to, and Turks are quite right to feel insulted when dubious figures from the Council of Europe want to butt in on the Ocalan trial. It is irresponsible of the Harold Pin- ters of this world to argue as they do about a place that they do not understand. Since the days of his blunders about the Sandinistas he seems to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. There is a Kurdish cause, and various solutions to the problem could be aired; but they should not include any sympathy for Ocalan and the terrorists, and it is not up to English play- wrights to offer them any aid and comfort.