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Last Updated: Sep 5, 2008 - 11:13:42 AM |
Dogan’s claim was alleged to have come during investigations into the
so-called Ergenekon ultranationalist gang, which was established by a
handful of radical secularists – many of them retired covert operatives
- who planned to stage a violent campaign to try to destabilize the
moderate Islamist government of the Justice and Development Party
(Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi - AKP) (see Terrorism Monitor, January 29).
Although it is based around a kernel of truth, the Ergenekon
investigation has become highly politicized. The AKP sympathizers in
the lower echelons of the judiciary who are responsible for the
investigation have tried to claim that Ergenekon is synonymous with –
rather than being established by former members of – the web of covert
networks and organizations, many of them with links to elements in the
Turkish military, commonly referred to in Turkish as the derin devlet
or “deep state”. The 2,455 page indictment in the Ergenekon case, which
was presented to the 13th Serious Crimes Court in Istanbul on July 25,
contains a potpourri of fact, hearsay and blatant invention; including
claims that the Ergenekon gang was directly or indirectly responsible
for almost every act of terrorism and political assassination in Turkey
over the last 20 years (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 29).
The indictment has reinforced suspicions that the main aim of the
Ergenekon investigation is not to uncover the truth behind Turkey’s
deep state but to discredit the staunchly secularist military, whom
most AKP supporters rightly regard as the main obstacle to the party’s
efforts to ease some of current restrictions on the expression of a
religious identity in Turkey, such as the ban which prevents women
wearing traditional headscarves from attending university. The
Ergenekon indictment also attributes numerous acts of terrorism
previously blamed on Islamist militants either to groups established by
Ergenekon or to false flag operations by the organization itself, thus
providing psychological reassurance to the vast majority of the AKP’s
supporters, whose genuine horror at the violence sometimes perpetrated
in the name of their religion has created a culture of denial and
improbably complex conspiracy theories.
As a result, any information which makes its way into the Turkish media
in relation to the Ergenekon investigation needs to be treated with
considerable caution. This is frustrating not only because the deep
state is a reality of modern Turkish history, but because many deep
state operations are known to have included elements from JITEM.
The Turkish Gendarmerie is responsible for the maintenance of law and
order outside urban areas, which are the responsibility of the Turkish
National Police (TNP). In peacetime, the Gendarmerie is under the
theoretical command of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) rather
than the Turkish General Staff (TGS), which only assumes direct control
of the Gendarmerie in time of war. Nevertheless, even in peacetime, the
Gendarmerie is attached to the TGS for training and special duties and
to the Land Forces for weaponry and equipment. It draws its officer
corps from cadets at military academies. Almost all officer-recruits
will remain in the Gendarmerie for the rest of their careers. It is
very rare for there to be any exchange of personnel with the other
services. The one exception is the commander of the Gendarmerie, who is
traditionally a four star general on secondment from the Land Forces.
The Gendarmerie Creates an Intelligence Department
In practice, the Gendarmerie has thus enjoyed a somewhat ambivalent
status, feeling closer to the regular military than the TNP, but under
the complete control of neither the MIA nor the TGS. As a result, when
the Gendarmerie began to establish a counter-terrorism capability in
response to the first insurgency of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK),
it was able to run covert operations virtually free of any oversight.
Prior to the PKK launching its insurgency in 1984, the Gendarmerie’s
intelligence gathering activities were conducted by uniformed officers
working with local Gendarmerie units. However, as the PKK began to step
up its campaign of violence, the decision was taken – it is unclear
when or by whom – to establish specialized units who would not only
gather intelligence but also use it to conduct covert counter-terrorism
operations.
Dogan is reported to have told Ergenekon investigators that he founded
in the mid-1980s what was then known as the Gendarmerie Intelligence
Group Command (Jandarma Istihbarat Grup Komutanligi - JIGK), which
later became known as JITEM. He added that he handed over the command
of JIGK in 1990 to Colonel Veli Kucuk (Milliyet, August 16; Sabah,
August 25; Zaman, August 27). Kucuk was later promoted to the rank of
general. He is currently in prison awaiting trial on charges of being
one of the leaders of Ergenekon. Although he has admitted to serving in
JITEM, Dogan has denied any knowledge of, or connection with, Ergenekon
(Milliyet, August 16; Sabah, August 25; Zaman, August 27).
The claim that Dogan founded JITEM is currently impossible to confirm.
However, it is known that, by the early 1990s, JITEM units were playing
a leading role in the fight against the PKK. The structure and chain of
command of JITEM both remain obscure. However, individual units appear
to have enjoyed a large degree of operational autonomy and almost
complete immunity from prosecution (Author’s interviews, southeast
Turkey, 1991-99). Indeed, throughout the 1990s, the Gendarmerie high
command consistently denied that JITEM even existed.
Recruiting from the PKK
Although JITEM units were usually led by career Gendarmerie officers,
from the late 1980s onwards they also recruited heavily from former
members of the PKK. Known as “confessors,” most had been captured and
agreed to switch sides in return for immunity from prosecution or
reduced jail sentences. In addition to gathering intelligence, JITEM
units would detain, interrogate, and frequently torture and execute
suspected PKK members. [1] JITEM units also targeted those who were
believed to be merely Kurdish nationalists, assassinating journalists
and intellectuals and bombing the offices of publishers and NGOs. No
reliable figures are available for the number of people killed by JITEM
in the 1980s and 1990s, although the number is estimated to be at least
several thousand. [2] Most of the killings occurred in the
predominantly Kurdish southeast of Turkey, where self-censorship and
pressure from the authorities ensured that they received little or no
coverage in the mainstream national press. Those that were reported
tended to be erroneously attributed to “an internal settling of
accounts” between rival PKK factions. Although witnesses were
frequently able to describe – and sometimes even name – the
perpetrators, it was very rare for Turkish authorities even to go
through the motions of launching an investigation (see Terrorism
Monitor, May 1).
Inevitably, some members of JITEM also used their de facto immunity
from prosecution for self-enrichment; this usually occurred through
extortion or involvement in the trade in heroin trafficked through
eastern Turkey from Afghanistan to markets in Europe. Rivalries between
different groups involved in the same activities frequently led to
tensions and even violence.
False Flag Operations
During the late 1990s, with the PKK in retreat on the battlefield, the
number of extrajudicial executions declined. By the end of the decade,
the majority of JITEM operatives responsible for the worst of the
abuses had either retired or been killed in turf wars with rival
groups. JITEM returned to focusing primarily on intelligence gathering.
However, the resurgence in PKK violence from 2004 onwards led to an
increase in accusations of JITEM involvement in “false flag” bombings
and shootings of suspected PKK sympathizers, albeit at nowhere near the
level of the 1990s. Most notably, on November 9, 2005, one person was
killed and six injured when a bomb exploded in a bookshop run by an
alleged former member of the PKK in the town of Semdinli in southeast
Turkey. The Gendarmerie subsequently issued a report claiming that the
bombing had been the work of the PKK. This was contradicted by eye
witnesses, who identified three members of the Gendarmerie – including
two former PKK “confessors” – as being responsible for the attack.
Unlike the 1990s, this time the local prosecutors were prepared to
prosecute. But, as has happened with the Ergenekon investigation, the
case soon fell victim to the ideological struggle between the AKP and
the TGS.
Through early 2006, AKP sympathizers conducted a defamation campaign
against the then commander of the Land Forces, General Yasar Buyukanit,
who was due to take over as chief of the TGS in August 2006. Buyukanit
was a noted hard-line secularist and was expected to be much more
assertive in his dealings with the AKP government than the then
chief-of-staff, General Hilmi Ozkok. When Buyukanit publicly commented
that he had once worked with one of those accused of the Semdinli
bombings, a pro-AKP public prosecutor named him in the indictment.
Under pressure from the TGS, the public prosecutor was summarily
dismissed and Buyukanit’s name removed, triggering a war of words
between supporters of the AKP and the military, each accusing the other
of abusing the judicial system for their own ends. Although the accused
Gendarmerie members were subsequently convicted of carrying out the
bombings, the furor over Buyukanit’s inclusion in the indictment meant
that critical questions about the attack - not least who in the
Gendarmerie command chain was ultimately responsible for authorizing it
– still remain unanswered.
Conclusion
Regretfully, the politicization of the Ergenekon investigation suggests
that any more information that emerges about JITEM, whether from Dogan
or any of the other former JITEM operatives who are currently in
custody, is likely to meet the same fate — AKP supporters believing
every detail and their opponents dismissing it all as ideologically
motivated invention. Yet the truth, as so often happens, lies somewhere
in between.
Notes:
1. For a graphic firsthand account of the activities of one such
confessor who worked for JITEM during this period, see Timur Sahin and
Ugur Balik, Itirafci: Bir JITEM’ci Anlatti, Aram Yayincilik, 2004.
2. Human rights activists claim that elements in the deep state, most
of them with links to JITEM, carried out 17,500 political murders in
the 1980s and 1990s (Author’s interviews, Van, August 2008). The real
number was probably considerably less.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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