Bullet-riddled body of child casts shadow over Turkey’s EU aspirations
By Meriel Beattie in Kiziltepe, Turkey
The Independent
06 April 2005
With his small face, framed by the broad white Peter Pan collar
worn by schoolchildren throughout Turkey, Ugur Kaymaz looks even
younger than 12. His wide, dark eyes stare out of a black-and-white
photograph, sellotaped to the windscreen of his father’s truck where
the pair died in a hail of gunfire last November. The truck hasn’t
moved since, parked by the roadside in Kiziltepe, a rundown town on
the troubled road to Iraq and Syria. The caption under the photograph
reads: “People won’t forget you.”
With Turkey bent on joining the European Union, the bloody conflict
with its Kurdish minority is one that Ankara would like forgotten. But
there has been a resurgence in fighting. This week the army said that
it had killed nine “Kurdish rebels” in five days of clashes.
With Brussels watching, the bullet-riddled body of a child is
proving hard to explain. Four policemen are on trial accused of the
extra-judicial killing of Ugur and his father and then planting a
large rifle in the boy’s small hands.
The handling of the Kaymaz killings has become a test case, at home and
abroad, for Ankara’s willingness to rein in its feared security forces,
particularly in the embattled Kurdish villages of the south-east.
“Even though the laws are changing, the people who are supposed to
implement those laws in daily life are still working in the same old
way,” said Huseyin Cangir, the head of the Human Rights Association
and the Kaymaz family lawyer. “Turkey is trying to be a law-based
state. But what we still have is a police state.”
The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has scrapped the death penalty,
abolished the notorious state security courts and cut the time allowed
for detention without trial.
Kiziltepe’s mainly Kurdish residents have been traumatised after years
of armed conflict. The Kaymaz family had to leave their own village
because of the fighting. Ugur’s father, Ahmet, had been detained
at least twice on suspicion of supporting the militants. He had no
proven links to the PKK.
With unemployment high, Ahmet, like many men here, made his money
transporting oil between northern Iraq and the Turkish refineries.
On the evening her son and husband died, Makbule said it was already
dark and she was putting out the plates for dinner. Ahmet, who was
getting ready for another oil run, needed to carry his duvet and
other things for the trip over to the truck – and Ugur went with him
to help. Then she heard noises.
“When I looked for a second from our gate, I could see Ugur,” she
says. “I recognised his white trousers. Policemen were forcing him
down, pushing him to the ground.
“When we heard the gunfire, I took all the children and went to our
neighbour’s. And then after a while a lady, the state prosecutor,
came in and said “My condolences,” but I didn’t understand what was
going on. They didn’t say then that they’d killed Ahmet and Ugur. We
couldn’t believe that they had died. One of them was a truck driver,
the other a schoolboy. Why would they do that?”
The official versions of what happened are quite different. The police
say they were acting on a tip-off that a PKK attack would be launched
from the Kaymaz house on a passing military convoy. Initially the
shootings were described as a “clash” in which the police claimed they
returned fire after father and son started shooting. That version was
later changed to say that they were killed after ignoring an order
to stop.
Immediately after the incident, the provincial governor Temel Kocaklar
denounced Ahmet and Ugur Kaymaz as “terrorists”.
In the past that would have been the end of it. Then Ahmet Tekin
intervened. A teacher at Ugur’s school, he was asked by police to
identify the two bodies.
Remarkably in a community which has learnt to keep its mouth shut,
Mr Tekin has talked openly of the policemen’s initial disbelief when
he told them Ugur’s name and age – a reaction interpreted by the
family’s lawyers to suggest they had actually come for someone else.
More significantly, it is Mr Tekin – one of the few people to see the
weapon lying next to Ugur’s body – who has repeatedly emphasised the
absurdity of the idea that he could have carried such a large gun.
Then something unprecedented happened – in a country where abuse of the
Kurdish minority is overlooked – the public got interested. Photos of
Ugur soon appeared in the papers, incensing public opinion. Journalists
seized on autopsy reports that nine of the bullets in Ugur’s back
had been fired from just 50cm. A parliamentary commission criticised
the security forces. The Prime Minister weighed in, criticising the
governor’s description of the child as a terrorist. Four of the police
involved were suspended. A date was set for a trial.
That momentum may now be fading. By the time the trial opened, all four
policemen had been reinstated and reassigned to other districts. The
Kaymaz family lawyers claim that the public prosecutor has watered
down the case.
Ahmet’s brother Resat, said: “If you don’t make people here feel
secure, what will these children do when they grow up? They go to
the cities and become pickpockets. Or they join the PKK.”