Beleaguered and Besieged; Turkey's pro-European elite is the target of a growing wave of violent ultra-nationalism.

Byline: Owen Matthews (With Sami Kohen in Istanbul)

The threats have been arriving daily, often via e-mail. "You traitors to Turkey have had your day," reads one. "Stop prostituting yourself and your country to foreigners or you will face the consequences."

Not long ago, E, a prominent Turkish writer, would have shrugged off such missives--as did his friend Hrank Dink, the editor of Agos, Turkey's main Armenian-language newspaper, who for years had been a target of nationalist hate-mail. But after Dink was shot dead last month by a 17-year-old ultranationalist assassin, the threats suddenly became deadly serious. "Things are changing in Turkey, very much for the worse," says E, asking that his name not be used for fear of reprisals. "Before Dink's murder, I always spoke out against nationalism and narrow-mindedness. Now I fear for my life."

A wave of violence is sweeping Turkey, targeting its modern, pro-European elite. Prominent liberals like Can Dundar, a columnist at the newspaper Milliyet who supported a 100,000-strong march in Istanbul protesting Dink's killing, have received warnings to "be smart" and tone down their coverage. Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk, vilified by nationalists for comments he made last year condemning the massacres of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, canceled a reading tour in Germany and has left Turkey for self-imposed exile in the United States. Many other academics and journalists have been given police protection.

It's not only intellectuals who feel beseiged. Turkey's ruling AK Party faces the same peril--a nationalist backlash that is undermining four years of sweeping progress. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once feared by Turkey's pro-Western elite for his Islamist background, finds himself fighting to protect liberal values on everything from human rights and free expression to membership in the European Union. Erdogan condemned Dink's murder as "a bullet fired at the heart of Turkish democracy." The killers, he said, were "not nationalists but racists," bent on isolating Turkey from the modern world. But the evidence is mounting that the tide is turning against him and his European agenda.

The nationalists have a growing list of grievances. Chief among them: that Erdogan, prodded by Brussels, granted more cultural rights to the country's 13 million Kurds. But instead of peace, the last year has seen an upsurge in Kurdish guerrilla attacks on Turkish soldiers. That's given rise, in turn, to a number of anti-Kurdish nationalist groups. The leader of one such group, the Patriotic Forces in Mersin, an ethnically mixed town in the largely Kurdish southeast, recently called on "Turkish patriots" to take to the streets to prevent Kurds from "taking over." Worse, Erdogan's entire EU project was called into question last December when Brussels partially suspended talks in a dispute over Cyprus. After so many sacrifices for Brussels' sake, many Turks considered it "a slap in the face," says Naci Tunc, an activist for the Nationalist Action Party, ...