Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

REVUE DE PRESSE~PRESS REVIEW~BERHEVOKAÇAPÊ~RIVISTA STAMPA~DENTRO DE LA PRENSA~BASIN OZETi
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Turkish Probe June 24, 1994
A Country of Mystery Murders
Ismet G.lmset
l'TUrkey has come face to face with an expanding
movement of terrorism which
has turned into a militia movement. We
know the names of the businessmen and artists
from whom money is being extorted by the PKK.
We will make them pay."
When Prime Minister Tansu Çiller first made
this statement in Istanbul on Nov. 4, 1993, it was
not clear what this senior state official was referring
to.
But exactly two months after this statement,
Kurdish businessman and suspected drug trafficker
Behçet Cantürk was kidnapped along with his driv- .
er; while heading home in Istanbul. The two were
tortured and killed. Their bodies were found later on
the Sapanca road.
On the night of Jan. 24, Cantürk's attorney Yusuf
Ekinci never returned to his house at Oran, Ankara,
either. Two days later his body was found on the
Konya road.
. Sitting in a coffee shop in the Sehremini district of
Istanbul on March 26, Kurdish-origin Fevzi Arslan
and his cousin $ahin were "picked up" by four people
who identified themselves as police officers.
A day later, their bodies were found in Hendek
district. On May 8, Kurdish-origin bureaucrat Namik
Erdo!:}an also went "missing." Three days later, his
family was informed that his body had been found
on the Ankara-Kirikkale road.
Sava~ Buldan, Adnan Ylldmm and Haci Karay,
all of Kurdish origin and suspected supporters of
the Democracy Party (DEP), were leaving an Istanbul
gambling house at around dawn last month.
Seven people, dressed in plain clothes and identifying
themselves as policemen, put them into cars
at the exit. Days later, the bodies of the three were
found near the western city of Bolu. All had been
tortured and later killed.
According to the popular weekly Aktuel magazine,
in each killingthe assailants had used Israelimade
Uzi guns. A report filed by Ay~egül I~can and
$enol Konukçu said last week that Buldan's brother
Necdet claimed the three had first been driven to
the Prime Ministry firing range in Sapanca forest
and tortured. .
Later, they were all shot in the back of the head.
Indeed, people have been paying in Turkey and
paying very heavily.
All of those who have "paid" are of Kurdish origin
and, where officials are concerned, people heavily
suspected by the police of providing financial assis-
tance to Kurdish activists. Kurds and Kurdish businessmen
are more and more turning into the target
of anger.
Mehmet Sincar was a DEP deputy and as he
toured Batman province to investigate "mystery killings"
last year, he was approached by an unidentified
gunman and killed.
About a week later, a bomb came flying into a
house where Leyla Zana, another MP from the
same party, was staying. She was spared certain
death, having decided to go upstairs just before the
explosion.
According to Amnesty International, perhaps the
most respectable rights watchdog group which
many governments love to hate, "death-squad-type
killings are reported almost daily" in Prime Minister
Tansu Çiller's Turkey.
The right to live, for Turkish and Kurdish dissidents,
is almost non-existent.
The Kurds are especially paying.
In New York, which she recently visited along
with a large entourage of officials on a "personal"
trip, Çiller was to boast to a group of Turkish journalists
that her government "has done in 10 months
what other governments have failed to do in 10
years."
Indeed this is true.
If one forgets that more than 350 people have fallen
victim to mystery murders, if one forgets that
some 70 DEP activists have been slain, if one forgets
that Turkey has turned into a country where, in
Amnesty'swords, "the situation gets graver by the
hour."
One can even forget that at least 24 people have
"disappeared" without trace this year or that many
more have been abducted and their bodies found
later. Or that 900 villages have been forcefully
evacuated or that 12,000 or so Kurds have run off
to Iraq.
But it seems impossible to forget the overall damage
inflicted on Turkish democracy with what is going
on.
With the recent persecution of Kurdish businessmen
and politicians, with the closure of DEP
and the consequences of the case and with the killings,
which no one seems to investigate or care
about any longer, Turkey risks becoming a country
of fear -- a country of mystery deaths and abuses...
Something no one, not a single citizen of this republic,
can accept. •
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