Turkey’s killing fields

The research continued and soon 20 suspected human bones were discovered close to a village near Cizre. Moreover, a shocking confession came from Abdülkadir Aygan, a former Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, member who later joined security forces and finally settled in Sweden as a "victim of war."

"During the ’90s," Aygan said to the press, "many people were burnt in acid wells and then were buried underground." The bones that were just found are now thought to be the remnants of those real victims of war.

’Counter-terrorism’ via terror

For those who know the ugly truth behind Turkey’s "counter-terrorism" campaign, this is not a big surprise. The climax of that campaign was during the ’90s, when the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a truly terrorist group, raised its ongoing insurgency to the level of civil war. In response, Turkish security forces not only carried out massive raids in the country’s mountainous Southeast and even in northern Iraq, but they also decided to deal with the "support base" of the PKK. And horrible human rights abuses came from the latter decision.

What really happened was that the security forces started to kill anybody who was suspected to be a PKK supporter. "A list of Kurdish businessmen who financed the PKK was prepared," says Orhan Kemal Cengiz, a lawyer, writer and human rights activist. "Then these people were shot one by one, in the middle a street, or near a highway." Yet most of these poor victims had no option other than financing the PKK: The organization had threatened to kill them and their families had they not supported the Kurdish "national cause." They were simply trapped between two warring parties.

In late ’90s, the Turkish Parliament established a commission to investigate these "unsolved murders." A staggering figure of 17,500 came out as the death toll. These victims included Kurdish businessmen, intellectuals, journalists, activists or simply peasants who made the mistake of giving food and shelter to PKK guerillas when they came to their villages and asked for it. (Had they said no, they then probably would have been killed by the guerillas.) The organization, which is believed to responsible for these extra-judicial killings, is the notorious and murky JİTEM, or the Gendarme Intelligence Organization. The funny thing about JİTEM is that the Turkish military categorically denies that it ever existed. But everybody in the Southeast talks about JİTEM and how its officers killed this or that person.

"They would often shoot someone in the head," notes Cengiz, "and then call his family or relatives to say, ’Your corpse is on that street, go and take it.’" But apparently they used various techniques for execution, Cengiz adds, and the acid wells and the killing fields might be one such atypical method. Killing 17,500 people one by one demands a lot of hard and, sometimes, "creative" work. This was all known in the ’90s, and Parliament’s Unsolved Murders Commission learned that the head of JİTEM was a certain general named Veli Küçük. So, Küçük was invited to testify to Parliament, yet he never bothered to even give an answer. And that was it! Nothing happened. The generals are (or at least they used to be) the highest power brokers in this country, and they have been simply untouchable. But, as you know, thing started to change in the 2000s, and the power of the civil authorities began to grow. That’s why Küçük is now in prison as a crucial suspect in the Ergenekon trial.

Why Ergenekon is crucial

In fact, we have been able to disclose the killing fields thanks to this trial, too. One of the secret witnesses in the Ergenekon investigation told the prosecutors about the story and the location of these wicked places, and that’s how the excavations started. After the discoveries, a colonel, named in the press now only as "C.T.," and who used to be the head of the gendarme forces in Cizre between 1993 and 1996, was arrested. In his confessions, PKK informant Abdülkadir Aygan describes this colonel and his team as follows:

"They really terrorized the people in that area. They threw some people into acid wells simply for being suspected to support to PKK or even having a brother in the mountains. É They also threatened people in order to take their money. Once they dressed up as PKK militants, stopped a bus on the road between Cizre and İdil, and took all the women’s golden bracelets and necklaces."

It sounds pretty awful, right? Well, this is just a glimpse of the way business used to be done in the old Turkey, in which men in uniform were not accountable to anybody. But things are changing, and those who created the killings field or conspired ,m military coups are facing justice for the first time. That’s why the Ergenekon trial is crucial, and that’s why there are so many people around who are doing everything they can to make it fail.