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Turkey’s Empire of Fear: Mass Graves of
the Kurds
26.2.2011
By Orhan Kemal Cengiz |
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February 26, 2011
If you ask me, the ugliest crime any state could
commit against individuals is to make them
disappear.
This heinous crime not only deprives an individual
of his/her most basic human rights, but is also a
kind of collective punishment that makes all
relatives of the disappeared person suffer endless
emotional oscillation between hope and despair while
also terrorizing large parts of society to which
this individual belonged.
In the 1990s, mostly in the Southeast but in many
parts of Turkey as well, people were deliberately
and systematically made to disappear. Sometimes they
were kidnapped in broad daylight in front of their
relatives, |
File photo |
sometimes they were
taken from their homes after midnight and sometimes
they were forced to get into vehicles and driven off
with no one ever hearing about them or seeing them
again. Many other victims were also made to
disappear after officially being taken into custody
-- in this later type of disappearance, officials,
of course, came up with many different excuses.
According to these official narratives, the victim
simply broke out of jail or was released and went to
the mountains.
All these things happened in connection with the
Kurdish question, and the Gendarmerie Intelligence
Anti-Terrorism Unit (JİTEM), an illegal extension of
the gendarmerie, had always been implicated in
connection with all these disappearances. The
Turkish military has never acknowledged the
existence of this unit,www.ekurd.netbut
everyone knows that it did exist and that it carried
out endless murders across the country. Thanks to
the Ergenekon trial, most of the founders and
prominent figures of JİTEM are now behind iron bars.
As regular readers of this column know quite well, I
criticize Ergenekon prosecutors for not looking at
the evidence from the victims’ perspective and not
following links that will connect these cases to
unsolved murders and endless attacks on Kurds and
religious minorities. While stating all these
criticisms, I also try to explain how the Ergenekon
trial changed the overall political atmosphere in
Turkey, how deep state-sponsored murders stopped and
how attacks and threats against minorities have
decreased significantly.
I wish all JİTEM structures could be uncovered; I
wish all these past atrocities could be solved and
that their perpetrators could be identified.
Ergenekon trials do not operate in as wonderful a
manner as could be, but as a result of this general
change of atmosphere in Turkey, things we could not
imagine before are now happening.
One of the hopeful, yet painful, developments is the
excavation of mass graves in southeast Turkey.
Prosecutors, upon the demands of human rights
lawyers and victims, ordered excavations to find
mass graves. The results are shocking and
disturbing. Every day new mass graves are being
excavated anew. If this were to happen in any other
country, I guess each excavation would be the
headline of every single newspaper. Tragicomically,
people who do not pay attention to these mass graves
relentlessly try to convince us that Turkey became a
republic of fear because of the Ergenekon case. They
claim that it is because of the Ergenekon trial that
“dissidents” were silenced. While they engage in
intense advocacy for the rights of Ergenekon
suspects, they pay no attention to these mass
graves, exactly as was the case when JİTEM was
killing all these people in southeast Turkey.
With the excavation of these mass graves I think the
empire of fear in Turkey is really collapsing. Just
look at the following information provided by the
Turkish Doctors Union (TTB) after carrying out
research on these mass graves: “Bones belonging to
1,469 people have been found in 114 mass graves so
far. The excavations of 26 mass graves uncovered the
remains of 171 people.”
The TTB, after provided this information, cautioned
the public, saying that “the real dimensions of this
issue were going to increase these numbers by far.”
The more these mass graves are revealed, the more
parts of the puzzle will come together. These mass
graves tell us the real story of the empire of fear,
which has been in steady decline for a while. Pay
attention to the story that has been told by these
mass graves, not to the one told by propagandists
and their crocodile tears.
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