MURDER IN ANATOLIA - European Stability Initiative - ESI

1. INTRODUCTION
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In April 2007 a gruesome triple murder took place in the Central Anatolian city of Malatya.
The victims, tortured, stabbed and strangled, were two Turks and one German. All three were
Protestant Christian missionaries who had recently moved to Malatya. Five young men,
armed with knives and covered in blood, were found at the scene of the crime only moments
after it happened.
What made the Malatya killings different from an ordinary murder case was the suspicion,
present from the outset, that this was not an isolated attack by a group of nationalist
youngsters. As the investigation unfolded, serious questions began to emerge, which have not
yet been answered. Were anti-government elements of the Turkish state – or, more
specifically, secret networks within the Turkish gendarmerie and ultranationalists linked to
them – involved? Was the murder of missionaries in Malatya an operation by Turkey‟s socalled
“deep state” to destabilise an elected government by targeting Christian “enemies” of
the Turkish nation? 2
This has certainly been the impression of the team of lawyers, a who-is-who of Turkey‟s
most prominent human rights defenders, who have been representing the families of the
victims in the Malatya trial that began in November 2007. From the very beginning these
lawyers have drawn attention to the anti-Christian and anti-missionary campaigns in Turkey
that were supported by a number of ultranationalist associations and writers and which had
gained intensity in the period leading up to the Malatya murder. They also underlined that the
murdered Christians had in fact been under permanent close observation by the gendarmerie
and that the main murder suspect, Emre Gunaydin, had close contacts with the police. They
pointed out that the gendarmerie was monitoring missionary activity in close cooperation
with academics at Malatya University, whose rector was an outspoken ultranationalist,
regularly meeting with leaders of the Turkish military.
As the Malatya trial unfolded, many more links have emerged between the Malatya murders
and ultra-nationalists elsewhere in Turkey who have since been arrested for plotting to
overthrow the government, for which, prosecutors have argued, they had formed a terrorist
network called Ergenekon. 3 Witnesses in Malatya explicitly linked the murders of the
missionaries to an infamous institution much discussed in Turkey in the 1990s as being
responsible for a series of mysterious assassinations, the secret Gendarmerie Intelligence and
Counter-terrorism Department (Jandarma Istihbarat ve Terorle Mucadele, or JITEM)
together with one of its alleged founders, a Turkish ultranationalist and retired gendarmerie
general, Veli Kucuk. Kucuk himself played a leading role in anti-Christian campaigns in
Istanbul which preceded the assassination of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. 4 Both
in Malatya and in Istanbul the local branches of the ultranationalist Grey Wolf youth
2
For background on Turkey‟s power struggles in 2007-2008 see also: ESI Briefing: Turkey‟s dark side. Party
closures, conspiracies and the future of democracy, April 2008.
3
For background on Ergenekon see also: ESI Briefing: Turkey‟s dark side. Party closures, conspiracies and the
future of democracy, April 2008.
4
In 2006 Veli Kucuk was part of a group of aggressive ultranationalists holding up a banner outside a court
room in which Hrant Dink was tried on the charged of insulting Turkishness, which accused Dink of being “the
son of a missionary.” See also: Fethiye Cetin and Deniz Tuna, Third Year Report on Hrant Dink‟s Murder, p. 4.
To understand the background to the Hrant Dink case this is essential reading, as is the most recent Fourth Year
Report on Hrant Dink‟s Murder. Read also this 2009 briefing on the trial by the former member of the European
Parliament, Joost Lagendijk: Hrant Dink – A Victim of Intolerance and the Quest for Justice, July 2009. For
more on Hrant Dink go here: http://www.esiweb.org/index.php?lang=en&id=311&film_ID=10&slide_ID=24.
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