WHO’S BEHIND THE ASSASSINATION OF THREE KURDISH WOMEN IN THE HEART OF THE FRENCH CAPITAL?
Paris Murder Mystery
BY ERIC PAPE | JANUARY 11, 2013
PARIS – At first, it sounded like a horror story torn from the pages
of American tabloids: the corpses of three women were found on the
second floor office of an apartment building on Jan. 10. Two of the
women had bullets holes in the back of their heads, the third was
shot in the stomach and the forehead.
But this was here, in Paris, and just down the street from La Gare Du
Nord, the city’s main train station. Multiple murders don’t happen
often in the French capital. Guns, while very gradually becoming
more common in parts of France, are rarely used by anyone other than
authorities. Sometimes though, they are used by hit-men, terrorists,
or hit-men hired by terrorists.
So when suited men pushed a bright blue gurney holding a small,
limp corpse past journalists and passersby in the working class 10th
arrondissement on Thursday afternoon, it brought home how different
gun violence is here. This wasn’t a random crime, a brutal robbery,
a mentally ill person, or someone bullied until they retaliated,
aided by easy access to guns. This was, as French authorities quickly
recognized, a triple execution, almost certainly by a professional
killer, apparently using a silencer. The triple murder was so discreet
that in a multi-floor building, no one noticed when it happened. The
women were, police believe, killed at around 3 p.m. on January 9,
but their bodies were not found until after midnight.
Over the next 24 hours, French authorities — including its
anti-terror brigade — quickly pieced together the key elements of
what happened. Their ongoing investigation highlights the international
political intrigue and the broader stakes surrounding this attack. Two
of the three women were prominent members of France’s large Kurdish
immigrant community, 90 percent of whom come from Turkey, and the
executions took place just as the Turkish media were reporting that
Ankara and the militant Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) had come to
an agreement aimed at ending nearly the three decades of violence
that have claimed as many as 45,000 lives. The PKK is designated a
terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, France and the
European Union.
One of those killed was Sakine Cansiz, 55, a well-respected figure in
the Kurdish exile community and, Turkish authorities say, a founding
member of the PKK. Some Kurds in Paris believed her to be close to
Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is currently serving a
life sentence in Turkey. Ocalan, who has apparently softened his
attitudes on violence since his arrest, is apparently leading the
peace talks with the Turkish government from his jail cell. Those
talks are said to aim for a step-by-step cessation of hostilities:
the PKK is to stop its attacks in March and, soon after, the Turkish
state will restore the rights of its Kurdish minority, as well as
satisfy some other grievances. It is unclear how the triple murder
might affect those negotiations.
A second victim was Fidan Dogan, 32, who ran the Kurdish information
center where the bodies were found. She was a representative of the
Kurdistan National Congress, which is a Brussels-based coalition
of supportive organizations across Europe. The third victim, Leyla
Soylemez, is described as a recently arrived twenty-something Kurdish
activist. She may well have been in the wrong place, with the wrong
people, at the wrong time. Various friends and colleagues told French
media that Dogan and Cansiz were aware enough of the dangers they faced
in the one-bedroom apartment that acted as the unmarked office for
the information center that they made sure to never be alone there,
but that may have merely meant a larger death toll when one or both
of them were targeted.
Shock over the executions has been sharp. Almost immediately after the
discovery of the bodies late at night by friends and colleagues —
who suspected something was up when they noticed the lights were on
in the office but the women weren’t answering their phones — word
spread quickly through the city’s Kurdish community. By morning on
Thursday, hundreds of Kurds had gathered outside, in front of quickly
installed police barricades. One of the many protest signs said:
“We are all PKK!” Another read: “Turkey the assassin, [President]
Hollande the accomplice!” Others called for a political solution to
the Kurdistan problem. Many protesters, some with tears in their eyes,
waved Kurdish flags.
The executions almost immediately unleashed a flurry of conspiracy
theories in the crowd, including some on fresh-made protest signs,
as to who was behind them. Suspects include the Turkish intelligence,
a right-wing nationalist fringe grouping in Turkey called the “Gray
Wolves,” and Iranian or Syrian authorities who want to destabilize
Turkey for being close to the West, the United States, and the French
government.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t take long to offer
his own theory. He told journalists on Jan. 11 that the murders were
likely the result of an internal battle within the PKK. His thin
evidence: the killer or killers had gotten into a building with a
security door code, and had somehow managed to get into the office
without breaking down the door. He also suggested that the killings
could have been the work of outside actors looking to sabotage the
peace negotiations.
His opinions are unlikely to carry much weight with Kurdish exiles
whose feelings of destabilization are very real. An unidentified young
man at the protest on Rue Lafayette summarized the sense of fury,
and vulnerability, that the killings instilled in the Kurdish exile
community. “Most of the people who are here have endured repression in
Turkey. Most are political refugees who came to France, and found that
here, too, the repression continues. There are massacres here, too.
There is a feeling of anger, of being fed up.”
Those who question the interest of French authorities — who
have repeatedly investigated allegations of extortion of Kurdish
businesses with a “revolutionary tax” — in pursuing justice in this
murder investigation could take heart from comments that same day
by President Francois Hollande. He declared that he was personally
affected by the attack, as he knew one of the victims who “regularly
came to meet” him and other political figures.
But the French president has a very full plate at the moment. In
addition to trying to restore the stagnant French economy, keep the
euro afloat, and invert the curb on inflation that is approaching
11 percent, Hollande gave the green light on Friday for French
troops to take part in a military intervention in Mali. Since
Hollande’s inauguration in May, Kurdish concerns have hardly been a
pressing issue, and it is no surprise that he wants to wait for the
investigation to advance before commenting further.
Kurds do have decades-old links to Hollande’s Socialist party. A large
wave of Kurdish immigrants came to France for economic reasons in the
1960s and 1970s, but those who followed in the 1980s tended to be
more politically inclined activists. And they managed to convince
then-President Francois Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, to raise
awareness about the hardships and discrimination that they faced in
Turkey and in parts of the Middle East. (Interestingly, when Iraqi
Kurds finagled an essentially autonomous region out of the U.S.-led
invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, it took the wind out of some
of their support in Europe.)
Given the many big issues weighing on Hollande, Kurdish exiles in
search of justice for the Paris murders might do well to stir a dead
woman’s personal link to the French president, to keep him focused
on their lost comrades.
How any of this will affect the negotiations between the imprisoned
Kurdish leader and Ankara, and what it means for the future of the
Turkish Kurds, remains an open question. As is the mystery of who’s
responsible for three new corpses in Paris.