13 ARRESTED IN PUSH TO STIFLE TURKISH ULTRANATIONALISTS SUSPECTED IN POLITICAL KILLINGS
Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times
January 28, 2008 Monday
In one of the biggest operations against Turkish ultranationalists
in decades, the authorities announced on Saturday night that they
had arrested 13 people who were part of a criminal group that was
suspected of carrying out political killings and having shadowy ties
to the Turkish state.
Among those arrested were three retired military officers, as well as
Kemal Kerincsiz, the neo-nationalist lawyer who filed dozens of legal
cases against Turkish intellectuals, including Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist, the state-run Anatolian News Agency reported.
The men were detained Tuesday for questioning but were not formally
arrested until Saturday.
One of those officers, Veli Kucuk, a former major general, was believed
to have been plotting to kill Mr. Pamuk, Turkish newspapers reported,
citing documents from the investigation. Mr. Kucuk is suspected of
running a secret unit within police forces that carried out bombings
and killings for which other groups were widely blamed.
The arrests have riveted Turks, many of whom have long suspected
underground links between political violence, such as the killings
of members of ethnic and religious minority groups, and illegal
groups within official state institutions like the military and the
judiciary. But the connections have proved elusive, often because of
insufficient evidence and suspiciously sloppy prosecutions.
"Everyone suspected something fishy was happening," said Ilter Turan,
a professor of political science at Istanbul Bilgi University.
"But the evidence was imperfect."
"Then suddenly this thing got uncovered."
The operation began last June, when a giant stockpile of explosives
and munitions was found in Istanbul. That led investigators to the
group whose members were among those arrested Saturday.
The group’s members are xenophobic ultranationalists who are suspected
of involvement in crimes, including the killings of three Christian
missionaries in central Turkey last year and the killing of Hrant Dink,
an Armenian-Turkish journalist.
In all, 28 people have been arrested since the operation began last
June, according to the Anatolian News Agency.
Mr. Kucuk, for example, called and harassed Mr. Dink in the months
when Mr. Dink was on trial under a law used against many intellectuals
that prohibits "insulting Turkishness," an English-language daily
newspaper, Today’s Zaman, reported. Mr. Kucuk was part of a posse of
ultranationalists who jeered at Mr. Dink during the trial.
The paper quoted the journalist’s brother, Orhan Dink, speaking at
the murder trial late last year, as saying that his brother "took
the Kucuk group very seriously," adding, "He knew that both Kerincsiz
and Kucuk were extremely serious and dangerous."
Turkish news reports say the group is believed to be similar to a
cold war-era arrangement, under which Britain and the United States
were reported to have encouraged secret paramilitary organizations
of hard-line anti-Communists in Europe to counter a possible Soviet
invasion.
The reports draw parallels to recent history in Turkey, when the
state tacitly supported paramilitary groups that were killing Kurdish
leaders. Turkey began an open war with the militant fringe of its
minority ethnic Kurdish population in the 1980s.
The last time Turks were given a glimpse of their state’s involvement
with organized crime was in 1996, when one of the country’s most
senior police commanders was found with a wanted assassin after the
Mercedes sedan in which they were riding crashed in the western town
of Susurluk. The man with the police commander was believed to have
masterminded the jailbreak of Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot Pope
John Paul II. Both men were killed in the crash, and a subsequent
investigation went cold, but the incident remains etched in Turkish
memory.
It is unclear the extent to which the current group is connected
to Turkey’s old guard of staunchly secular elite, who control
the military, the judiciary and a large portion of the country’s
bureaucracy. The two groups do share a similar chauvinistic vision for
Turkey, that of a pure Turkic-Muslim nation, unspoiled by religious
or ethnic minorities.
Another one of those arrested, Sevgi Erenerol, worked as the press and
information officer for the Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate, a group
whose sole purpose seems to have been harassing the Greek Orthodox
Church in Turkey, the religious leadership of one of Turkey’s few
Christian minorities.
It is unclear whether Turkish authorities will have more success
prosecuting this group than they did in the past. Turkey’s governing
party, a new class of observant Muslim politicians led by Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in the midst of a power struggle
with the old guard, a fight that might propel Mr. Erdogan to press
as hard as possible for results. "The government does have a stake
in seeing this through," Mr. Turan said.
So, it seems, does Mr. Kerincsiz, who in an interview this month
summed up the situation dramatically.
"It’s a struggle for the future of Turkey," he said.