As part of a push to erode support for separatist Kurdish rebels fighting the government, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday announced a planned investment of up to 15 billion dollars over five years in infrastructure projects in the mainly Kurdish southeast.

He also pledged a special public television channel broadcasting in Kurdish, Arabic and Farsi as opposed to weekly 45-minute broadcasts launched in 2004.

The announcement follows a week-long Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq last month to hunt Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels waging a 23-year campaign for self-rule in the southeast that triggered calls for Ankara to also consider political and economic measures to win over the Kurds.

For political analyst Dogu Ergil, the planned measures show Erdogan's unwillingness or inability to address the basic demand of Kurds to be accepted for their ethnic roots and be allowed to participate in Turkey's affairs as Kurds.

"Turkey has a system which is based on a Turkish ethnic identity and sees Kurds as a dependent component that has to suffice with what it is given and told to do," he said. "Unless Turkey addresses this issue, nothing can resolve the tensions between the state and society."

The measures are "an indication that the government does not want to or is unable to take a serious and bold step on the Kurdish issue" for fear of a nationalist backlash, Ergil said.

Many here, among them the army, are wary of Kurdish demands for political and cultural freedoms, which are also voiced by the PKK, a group, blacklisted by Turkey and much of the international community as a terrorist movement, whose separatist campaign has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

They fear that increasing cultural rights for Kurds could strengthen the PKK's hand and lead to the breakup of the country.

Turkey's main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), which enjoys considerable support among the Kurds, was also unimpressed by Erdogan's plans.

"The essence of the Kurdish problem is creating a nation based on a single language, a single religion and a single ethnicity," the party's deputy parliamentary group chairman Selahattin Demirtas said.

"One cannot solve the Kurdish problem with factories and Kurdish broadcasts," he added.

Such a change is difficult as rising rebel violence that culminated in the army's foray into northern Iraq has revived a nationalist rhetoric and frenzy, with Turks sending in letters of support to the army or lining up in front of conscription offices to fight the rebels.

"Turkey is fighting a monster of its own creation, a Frankenstein, right now," Ergil said. "The government believes that it will be very difficult to deal with the nationalist masses and such an effort will not have any significant return for them."

Sedat Laciner, president of the International Institute of Strategic Research (USAK) said time is needed for Turkey to back up economic measures for the Kurds with cultural and political moves.

"This is a more important area than economics and it requires a change of mentality and not just legal changes to expanding rights," he said.

"We have to get people not to be afraid of the word 'Kurd'," he added.