On December 17, 2004, the European Union (E.U.) decided that Turkey should
continue to the next stage of its application to join the union by setting a date for the
start of formal negotiations for full membership. An impressive track record of human
rights reforms—including the abolition of the death penalty, new protections against
torture, greater freedom of expression, and increased respect for minorities—prompted
the positive decision. Unfortunately the reforms did not help the 378,335 people who
were internally displaced in Turkey during the 1990s.
Mehmet Gurkan, a Kurdish muhtar (headman) from the village of Akcayurt, Diyarbakir province, has not been seen since he was detained by security forces on 18 August 1994. It is believed his detention relates to statements he made to the press in which he alleged that he and many others were tortured while held in a containment area set up at Topcular gendarmerie post after the security forces had burned out his village.
The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday issued a landmark ruling on one of the many incidents of killings and disappearances of Kurdish civilians by Turkish government forces in the early 1990s at the height of the conflict with the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). During that period the army forcibly evacuated and burned thousands of villages, in some cases killing villagers through shelling or aerial bombardment.
Turkey’s modern history has been marked by impunity for serious human rights abuses highlighted by the state’s systematic failure to hold to account members of the security forces and other public officials for serious violations in the decades following the September 1980 military coup.
In the 1990s, during the armed conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), government military and security forces compelled hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their villages, and carried out enforced disappearances and killings of thousands of civilians. Affected were mainly Kurds in Turkey’s southeastern and eastern provinces. The PKK also committed grave human rights abuses in the course of the conflict. According to official estimates, by 2008 the armed struggle between the military and the PKK had resulted in an estimated 44,000 deaths of military personnel, PKK members, and civilians.
Despite two parliamentary inquiries in the 1990s into the state’s collusion in political assassinations and involvement in lawless activities, no-one in the Turkish state was held accountable during this period for the pattern of gross human rights violations committed by the military and security services. A handful of prosecutions in the domestic courts resulted in the conviction of low level members of the security forces and police, who received nominal, low sentences. But there was no attempt to probe higher level involvement of state officials or to examine whether the violations were a matter of state policy.
There were positive indications of change in 2009, however, when a remarkable trial began in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır of a gendarmerie officer, retired colonel Cemal Temizöz, three former PKK members turned informers, and three members of the “village guard” (local paramilitary forces armed and directed by the gendarmerie). The prosecution accused the defendants of working as a criminal gang involved in the killing and disappearance of twenty people in and around the Cizre district of Şırnak province between 1993 and 1995.
These twenty killings were just a tiny fraction of thousands of unresolved killings and enforced disappearances that took place in the area in this period, as well as many more in other provinces of the region and in some of Turkey’s largest cities. Nonetheless after years of impunity, the investigation and prosecution of these cases marked a significant milestone. Temizöz is the most senior member of the Turkish military ever to stand trial specifically for gross violations of human rights committed in the course of the conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK.
The trial, which started in September 2009, offers an opportunity to examine the obstacles to securing accountability in Turkey’s domestic courts for state-perpetrated killings and disappearances in the mainly Kurdish-populated southeast of the country in the first half of the 1990s. In January 2012, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe described the trial as “a unique opportunity to shed light on a period of systematic human rights abuses in south-east Turkey, which feature prominently in the case-law of the ECtHR [European Court of Human Rights].”
This report examines some of the lessons the Temizöz trial provides about the current obstacles to effective investigation and prosecution of past abuses and highlights some of the reforms required to allow the effective criminal investigation of the hundreds and possibly thousands of similar cases. The report recommends further steps the Turkish government needs to take to combat impunity in Turkey.
Lessons of the Temizöz Trial
The Temizöz trial highlights obstacles to securing justice for victims of human rights abuses in the region in seven key areas:
Limited scope of investigation: The prosecutor failed to explore possible chain of command involvement in the killings beyond Cemal Temizöz, for example by investigating the command responsibility for the alleged crimes among the higher ranking officers in the region.
Non application of witness protection: While Turkish courts have widely used orders to conceal the identity of witnesses in organized crime and terrorism trials, there has so far been little application of the Witness Protection Law in trials relating to crimes committed by the security forces. Application of the Witness Protection Law in the Temizöz trial could have significantly increased the willingness of vulnerable witnesses to participate.
Witnesses retracting their statements: The Temizöz trial has demonstrated how witnesses called to testify because of their “insider” knowledge are liable to retract the initial witness statements they made before prosecutors when they appear before the court. Such witnesses include village guards, former PKK members turned informer, or military personnel and police.
Attempts to intimidate and direct witnesses: Clear evidence emerged in the course of the trial of attempts to interfere with witnesses.
Threats to lawyers: A striking aspect of the trial has been the threatening and insulting behavior in court of defendants towards some of the lawyers acting for the families of the victims. Judges in the case have failed to respond adequately to such behavior.
Length of proceedings: Since the Temizöz trial began in September 2009 there have been 36 hearings (up to June 22, 2012). The excessive duration of trials in Turkey is a long-standing concern. Long trials often lead to excessively prolonged detention for defendants pending verdict, and violations of the right to a fair trial. But lengthy proceedings also have serious implications for witnesses and their protection.
The village guard system: The continued existence of the village guards system by which civilian villagers are armed and paid by the state to join military and counter-terrorism operations alongside the regular security forces is a further social obstacle to efforts to secure accountability for the killings and enforced disappearances and other egregious violations of human rights in the southeast and eastern provinces of Turkey. The fact of some of the defendants in the Temizöz trial are village guards—in effect an irregular army operating within the local society—has contributed to the continuing fear of witnesses and families of victims.