GÜNAL KURŞUN

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GÜNAL KURŞUN
September 14, 2014, Sunday

Closing investigations into extrajudicial killings in Turkey?

A busload of Turkish soldiers was going from Elazığ to Bingöl in their civilian clothes and without their weapons at the end of May 1993. Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants stopped the bus at around 6 p.m. After taking 10 of them hostage, they showered the rest in front of the bus with bullets. It was clearly an execution as 1,547 bullets were used; 33 soldiers died and five survived.

Later on, Abdullah Öcalan [the leader of the PKK] declared in a statement in court that he did not order this to be done, and added that Şemdin Sakık, a previous commander of the PKK, gave the orders to kill non-combatant soldiers. After this, Sakık testified in the Ergenekon case anonymously using the nickname “Deniz,” and said interesting things on the PKK-deep state connection. Today it is still not known why nearly 50 soldiers were sent to their destination without any protective measures, why there were so many rest stops taken, why the civilian bus drivers were speaking on the phone so much, why the survivors were not questioned after the event and so on.

A brave public prosecutor named Osman Coşkun, who decided to go over this file in 2012, found an empty dossier in the Elazığ Military Court's archives. We do not see this kind of bold attempt on our judiciary often, so we were quite hopeful about this case, but during the post-Dec. 17 period [when a corruption investigation into the government and figures close to it became public], he was removed from his position just like a few thousand of his colleagues during the time starting from February 2014. Lots of other cases like this, including the assassination of Gen. Bahtiyar Aydın, the burning of large swathes of the town of Lice, the assassination of Kurdish intellectual Musa Anter, the assassination of the commander of the Mardin gendarmerie, Col. Rıdvan Özden, the cases of the 11 villagers who were taken into custody and then disappeared in Kulp, remains unresolved with many questions remaining as a result of this. I learned that the investigation which was started by Coşkun was split into two parts and sent to Bingöl and Elazığ, whose prosecutor offices decided Coşkun did not have jurisdiction and returned the files to the Elazığ Military Court.

There are around 10,000 cases like this in existence in Turkey. Although we have a huge burden to confront, we have expressed little intention to do so. What we have to do is simple: maintain an independent atmosphere in the judiciary so that they can conduct impartial and independent investigations and prosecutions. Immunity from prosecution is one of the key issues that Prime Minster Ahmet Davutoğlu's government has to overcome; unfortunately we do not see any positive signs of this yet. It is obvious that neither removing prosecutors willing to conduct these types of investigations from their positions, nor an increase in judges and public prosecutors' salaries -- which is planned to be executed after the elections of the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) in October and is understood to be a “legal” bribe -- will be a solution.

The Italian prosecutor Felice Casson, who prosecuted members of Operation Gladio, a NATO stay-behind paramilitary force left over from the Cold War in Italy, has stated: “If you allow political mechanisms and the government to restrict the judiciary, then it will not be possible for ongoing investigations to be carried out independently and correctly. … If prosecutors are not vested with full independence in investigations related to organized crimes such as terror and corruption, they will be unable to unearth involvement of politicians in those crimes, if any, and their investigations will be doomed to fail.”

We have a long way to go to confront this issue.

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