Crimes by state forces in the war against the PKK are being investigated at last, writes NICHOLAS BIRCHin Istanbul
SUPHIYE BAYKURA has lost count of the number of morgues and prosecutors she has visited since her husband Hasan disappeared one night in 1993 after being dragged from their Cizre house by police, soldiers and local militiamen.
Sixteen years on, as prosecutors in the southeastern Turkish province of Sirnak ordered excavations to begin today at five sites they believe could hold victims of state-backed death squads active during Turkey’s war against Kurdish separatists, she hopes she may finally find his bones.
Prosecutors were responding to information about possible mass graves given to them this January by 47 families whose relatives went missing during the 1990s.
But the real trigger for the digs, unprecedented in the region, is a massive ongoing investigation into an ultranationalist group charged with trying to overthrow Turkey’s government.
When the Ergenekon investigation began in June 2007, many Kurds were sceptical. Since last summer, however, police have arrested security force members notorious in Kurdish areas in the 1990s, raising hopes that Ergenekon may shed light on military- and police-linked paramilitary groups who played a central role in some of the darkest pages of Turkey’s recent history.
The first key arrest was Col Arif Dogan, co-founder of Jitem, a shadowy military police unit that human-rights activists and former members blame for hundreds of unsolved murders.
In January, police arrested a police special forces commander and Gen Levent Ersoz, the former Sirnak military police chief.
“It is a dream – this is a man who ruled like a pharaoh,” says Mudur Tanis, a lawyer from the Sirnak town of Silopi. In January 2001, his brother Serdar, a local politician, signed an affidavit saying Ersoz had threatened to kill him. A fortnight later, he was called to the military police station in Silopi. He was never seen again.
There are no reliable figures for the number of civilians who were murdered or who disappeared during Turkey’s 25-year war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Official statistics put murders between 1991 and 1995 at 1,412. Human rights groups reckon at least 5,000 died, including 1,000 missing, presumed dead.
Tahir Elci, a lawyer who has represented scores of victims’ families, remembers only one security forces member being convicted. “This is a system that protects its murderers,” he says.
Amid EU pressure to make its security forces more accountable, however, Turkey shows signs of changing.
In the past, Turkey’s mainstream media rarely reported crimes committed by state security forces active against the PKK. Now it has begun to question official depictions of the conflict.
In 2004, for example, when former Jitem member Abdulkadir Aygan published a book giving information about 28 murders that was so detailed that it enabled three families to trace their relatives’ remains, the media passed it over in silence.
When Aygan, who now lives in Sweden, told the hard-hitting new Turkish daily Taraf this January that Jitem was responsible for 80 per cent of unsolved murders in the southeast, most papers picked the story up.
As taboos crumble, Aygan is not the only one making striking revelations. Last month, a former minister admitted that 11 Sirnak villagers burned in a minibus in 1996 were killed by the state, not the PKK as the military then claimed.
The question is how far the new spirit of openness will be permitted to develop.
As self-appointed guardian of Turkey’s constitutional order, the military has not directly intervened in the Sirnak excavations. But when a retired colonel, who was among eight Jitem members on trial since last November for multiple murders, took his own life this January, the military and judiciary turned out en masse to his funeral.
“The message could not have been clearer,” says Mehmet Bekaroglu, a member of a parliamentary commission that tried to investigate Jitem in 1997.
“In our eyes, this man was not even on trial. We take full responsibility for the work he did.”
Since the arrest of Jitem members in connection with Ergenekon last summer, lawyers in the Jitem trial have repeatedly applied for their dossier to be investigated by prosecutors in charge of the Ergenekon case. They have yet to receive an answer.
Celal Baslangic, an Istanbul- based journalist who covered state abuses in Kurdish areas in the 1990s, worries that an Ergenekon investigation which does not touch Jitem risks being stillborn.
“In terms of both mentality and the people involved, Jitem and Ergenekon are the same – two legs of the same beast,” he says.
Like dozens of families in Cizre who lost relatives in the 1990s, Suphiye Baykura long ago gave up hoping that justice would be done in her case.
“My only hope is the people responsible for my husband’s murder have started to feel afraid,” she says. “If they are afraid, they might talk.”