TURKEY: Turkey’s powerful security forces are at the centre of a growing scandal as evidence grows that a fatal explosion in the remote Kurdish town of Semdinli was the work of their own men.
The bomb which killed a shopper in a bookshop on Wednesday was the 16th to go off in Turkey’s most southeasterly province in the last two months.
As they had for the others, the authorities at first blamed the blast on the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which renewed its 20-year guerrilla war against Turkey last year.
This time, though, locals caught the suspected bomber as he attempted to get into a car and drive off. Only prompt police intervention saved him and two other men with him from a lynching.
A search of the car revealed that the three men were members of Turkey’s feared military police intelligence, or Jitem. As well as identity cards, investigators also found machine guns, a map with the location of the bookshop outlined in red, and a list of local notables.
“The bombing was the work of people who stand to gain from a return to war,” said bookshop owner Sefer Yilmaz, voicing a belief widespread among Kurds that the PKK’s new campaign is the work of anti-democratic forces in the Turkish state.
“It is clear some elements are trying to stir things up here, and the state must ensure they fail,” added local MP Esat Canan, a member of Turkey’s chief opposition party.
The bombing, he added, was “worse than Susurluk”. He was referring to the 1996 scandal that first revealed links between Turkey’s intelligence services and the criminal underworld.
Of the three people killed in a car crash that night, one was a Jitem officer, another a notorious ultra right-wing gangster carrying two diplomatic passports signed by the interior minister.
In a documentary released this spring, a former Jitem operative claimed that 80 per cent of the 600 unsolved assassinations carried out in southeastern Turkey between 1990 and 1996 were the work of his organisation.
A parliamentary investigation into Susurluk fizzled out in 1997 after senior military and civilian leaders signalled they would not co-operate.
There is a risk the same thing could happen in Semdinli, where the investigation into the bombing remains shrouded in secrecy.
While the suspected bomber remains in custody, the other two men were released on Thursday after they told investigators their presence in the town centre was a coincidence. The news enraged locals, who barricaded the road leading into Semdinli and set fire to a police checkpoint.
Security forces responded by opening fire, killing one man and seriously injuring two others.
Protests spread yesterday to other towns in the mainly Kurdish southeast.
But Turkey has changed since 1996, one of the darkest years of the PKK war.
With half an eye on the European Union, which awarded the country candidate status in October, politicians from all parties show signs of taking the Semdinli affair very seriously.
“Those responsible for this will pay the price, no matter who they are,” Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan promised yesterday.
He added that a team of investigators from the interior ministry would be joining two delegations of MPs already in Semdinli.
This edited volume, comprising chapters by leading academics and experts, aims to clarify the complexity of Turkey’s Kurdish question. The Kurdish question is a long-standing, protracted issue, which gained regional and international significance largely in the last thirty years. The Kurdish people who represent the largest ethnic minority in the Middle East without a state have demanded autonomy and recognition since the post-World I wave of self-governance in the region, and their nationalist claims have further intensified since the end of the Cold War. The present volume first describes the evolution of Kurdish nationalism, its genesis during the late nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, and its legacy into the new Turkish republic. Second, the volume takes up the violent legacy of Kurdish nationalism and analyzes the conflict through the actions of the PKK, the militant pro-Kurdish organization which grew to be the most important actor in the process. Third, the volume deals with the international dimensions of the Kurdish question, as manifested in Turkey’s evolving relationships with Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the issue regarding the status of the Kurdish minorities in these countries, and the debate over the Kurdish problem in Western capitals.
Turkey’s political history is littered with alarmingly numerous murders, ‘disappearances’ and unexplained deaths of investigative journalists, academics, officials, businessmen, and human rights and other activists of various kinds. A notable recent example was the murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007. Death threats to prominent public figures such as the writer Orhan Pamuk, suspiciously-staged terrorist incidents, and unsolved violent attacks on the Alevi and other minorities can be added to this litany.1 Incidents such as these have convinced many Turks of the existence of a so-called ‘deep state’, assumed to be composed of an ultra-nationalistic, arch-Kemalist and authoritarian network of bureaucrats, lawyers, soldiers, policemen, criminals and the like. They are often drawn from, but acting in parallel to the state, immune to prosecution, acting against those judged to be in opposition to the official secularist, nationalist and authoritarian ideology of the Turkish Republic. The activities of the ‘deep state’ are often believed to spill over into criminal activity of various kinds.
Turkey’s powerful security forces are at the centre of a growing scandal as evidence grows that a fatal explosion in the remote Kurdish town of Semdinli was the work of their own men.
The bomb which killed a shopper in a bookshop on Wednesday was the 16th to go off in Turkey’s most southeasterly province in the last two months.
As they had for the others, the authorities at first blamed the blast on the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which renewed its 20-year guerrilla war against Turkey last year.
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest movements around the world,
and academic theories are racing to catch up with them. This series aims to
further our understanding of the origins, dealings, decisions, and outcomes
of social movements by fostering dialogue among many traditions of thought,
across European nations and across continents. All theoretical perspectives are
welcome. Books in the series typically combine theory with empirical research,
dealing with various types of mobilization, from neighborhood groups to
revolutions. We especially welcome work that synthesizes or compares different
approaches to social movements, such as cultural and structural traditions,
micro- and macro-social, economic and ideal, or qualitative and quantitative.
Books in the series will be published in English. One goal is to encourage nonnative speakers to introduce their work to Anglophone audiences. Another is to
maximize accessibility: all books will be available in open access within a year
after printed publication.
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—In 1993 and at the peak of daily confrontations between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) nine members of a Kurdish family were burned to death inside their home in a village near Mus.