Snow turns red at the edge of Tunceli's mountain roads as it soaks up the bronze-rich soil. Passing that red line is a matter of life or death in these areas, where violence has endured for 23 years.
Intense conflicts in the 90s -- and now sporadic violence between the military and Kurdish guerrillas -- have turned much of Turkey's rural south-east into a minefield. Security sources say some of the explosives now come from nearby Iraq.
The government has failed to make good on promises to clear up the mines laid across the countryside, so for those people who did not join the hundreds of thousands who fled, simple daily things such as letting children play outside or going to school have become a potential disaster.
Hidir Celik is testimony to the danger. His body riddled with shrapnel, pain registers on his face as he bends his legs to sit, even though doctors keep trying to remove pieces of the landmine that exploded near him in 2002, killing five people.
Staring into the distance, the plastic replacement for his right eye is designed to match the brown-yellow hue of his remaining iris. "Just give me back my sight, give me back my health. I don't want anything else," said the former scrap metal collector.
In fact he was relatively lucky. When some teenagers dumped outside his store a sack of scrap metal they had collected in the nearby hills, detonating the mine they had unknowingly picked up, he only lost his eye.
His accident is just one of hundreds to plague Turkey's rural, mainly Kurdish south-east region since 1984, when the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) launched an armed campaign to carve out an ethnic homeland.
Turkey's failure to clear up an estimated 400,000 mines laid during the conflict has helped drive the human toll higher -- even in a time of relative peace -- while hampering investment in a region already suffering severe poverty.
"During the 1990s when the violence between the state and the militant groups was intense, soldiers laid mines in what were considered points of passage for the PKK," said Ozgur Kaplan, president of the Tunceli Bar Association, who is overseeing several landmine cases brought against the state.
"The violence has slowed down now but the mines have remained," he said. Landmine deaths and injuries have risen to 533 since a five-year cease-fire between the PKK and Turkish military ended in 2004, according to government and NGO tallies.
It was in 2004 that Turkey promised to stop using landmines in its interior military operations, and agreed to clear the explosives. The PKK also says it has stopped using landmines, but a security source said both sides still lay the explosives.
Some security experts say the number of mines laid by the PKK exceeds those by the Turkish military. One security official said the guerrillas have used more as the fighters dwindle in number. The mines are easily smuggled in by fighters hiding in the mountains of northern Iraq, where they have access to weapons bazaars.
But with the conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish separatists now reduced to isolated skirmishes, some villagers have began trying to resume their former livelihoods.
"In the spring and summer, people take their sheep out to pastures to graze or they want to come back to their villages, but there are mines everywhere. How can people know where the mines are?" asked local mayor Cevdet Konak.
"The only way to know is for you or your cow to set one off," he said. No comprehensive studies have been done on the economic effects of mines, but Konak said they had caused great economic damage in the region.
"The main industry here is animal husbandry. But how can you graze your animals if you cannot move, and what will you do if one gets blown up? Free movement is essential for attracting investment to a region, for moving forward," he said.
The average income in husbandry is 300 Turkish lira ($220) per month, said Konak: one sheep can cost as much as 300 lira, a cow as much as 2,500 lira.
To clear explosives in heavily mined areas of the South and Southeast, Turkey's Finance Ministry has opened two tenders since 2005. Both were part of an effort to conform to the Ottowa Convention which gave signatories like Turkey 10 years to de-mine its interiors.
But both tenders were called off. While most de-mining contracts are based on cash payments for land cleared, the Turkish ones were set up so the winning bidder would win the right to establish an organic farm on the cleaned land for 49 years after clearing it, in a kind of 'rehabilitate and operate' system.
"The government is trying to get the land cleared without spending any money," said de-mining consultant Ali Koknar, who heads Washington-based AMK Risk Management. "The winning bid has to agree to farm the land for 49 years. That's not the way the de-mining industry works," he said.
Tunceli's provincial governor Mustafa Erkal said security forces were de-mining areas of the country, but declined to give further details. People living in the area are anxious. "We want to hear from the authorities that the mines have been cleared and that we now have the right to move about as we wish," said Konak. "Everyone's afraid, you can't go back to your village, you can't veer off the road."
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