Political murders haunt Turkey's Kurds

Political murders haunt Turkey's Kurds

By Aliza Marcus

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuter): Necati Aydin, a former union chief and Kurdish activist, was last seen alive in the state security court in Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey.

He had been detained three weeks earlier on suspicion of aiding separatist Kurdish rebels. Five days after the April 4 hearing, Aydin's corpse was found on a road at the city's edge.

Hundreds of people, many of them Kurdish nationalists, have been murdered or have "disappeared" in the southeast in the last three years of intensifying conflict between the Turkish state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The killings are so commonplace -- the interior ministry counted 103 in the first five months of the year -- that they receive only cursory coverage in the Turkish press. The ministry said suspects had been detained for 23 of the murders.

Human rights groups have urged Ankara to investigate. "The situation gets graver by the hour...death-squad-style killings are reported almost daily; and there has been an alarming increase in disappearances," said the London-based Amnesty International in a statement issued in June.

This year, the U.S. State Department devoted a whole section to the issue in its annual report on human rights in Turkey.

"Political murders and extrajudicial killings in 1993, attributed to both government authorities and terrorist groups, continued to occur at the relatively high 1992 rates," it said. Anne Burley, Amnesty's director for the European region, said it appeared that the security forces were involved in some of the murders. Turkish officials strongly deny this.

"In some cases the person was detained immediately before the killing and in other cases the person may have been threatened by the security forces," Burley told Reuters.

The chilling series began in July 1991 with Vedat Aydin, Diyarbakir branch chairman of the Kurdish-basd People's Labor Party (HEP), who was taken from his home by men who said they were police. His tortured body was found a few days later.

Victims since then have included some of Turkey's most prominent Kurdish activists. Musa Anter, a writer, was shot in Diyarbakir in September 1992. Member of parliament Mehmet Sincar was gunned down in broad daylight in Batman a year later.

At least 70 members of HEP and its successor, the Democracy Party (DEP) -- both now banned by the constitutional court -- have been murdered, as have several Kurdish journalists.

The Turkish authorities, denying any involvement by the security forces, say the murders are the work of the PKK or the result of a feud between the PKK and a shadowy Hizbollah group -- which have in the past agreed to halt the mutual killings.

"We know most are committed by the PKK, perhaps because the person did not want to join the group, or to settle an old score.

The problem is we have trouble catching them," said Bekir Selcuk, prosecutor at the Diyarbakir state security court.

Many Kurds in the region suspect that the security forces have used Hizbollah to pursue an undercover war against PKK militants and anyone else harboring nationalist opinions.

Last month, Turkish authorities cracked down on Hizbollah, charging 35 of its militants with treason for seeking to set up an Islamic Kurdish state. They were accused of involvement in 39 attacks in which 25 people were killed and 35 wounded in Batman and Diyarbakir. Fifteen of them face a possible death penalty.

Kurdish sources say Hizbollah itself split in 1992, setting off killings between one faction which advocates an Islamic Kurdish state and another seeking a broader Islamic revolution.

Many of the murders may never be solved, but the list is still lengthening, injecting new fear into a rugged region traditionally prone to blood feuds between Kurdish clans.