Закончили с армянами,

[Spezzatura]

The lives of families whose hopes for finding their missing relatives were renewed following the launching of the Ergenekon investigation are not easy. After their relatives disappeared, many of them had to move to other places and they became poorer.

The rest of their children had to quit school in order to find a job. Some of the relatives of the missing people stopped "uttering a single word" in order to express their protest and resentment. But some children, like Mehmet Hebun Özdemir and Mizgin Şen, were not yet born when their fathers disappeared.

Yasin recited over others' graves

"Because she suffers from a deep sorrow, she does not speak. She never speaks. She has been silent since that day," says İsmet İlbak, whose face is lined with deep wrinkles, pointing at his wife, Fatma. However, as soon as I step into the room that is full of children of all ages -- ranging from a sleeping infant in the cradle, a crawling toddler and several older kids who are drawing fake watches on their wrists -- Fatma puts her arms around me and starts to cry.

I discover that she is crying not from the sound of her sobs, but because of her tears rolling down onto me. Her deep-set eyes do the speaking. She makes some gestures with her thin-boned hands, and I occasionally hear feeble wheezing sounds.

By closing her mouth tight, Fatma has been protesting the disappearance of her son, İlhan İlbak, who was detained along with six other people in 1994; they were taken away in a helicopter and never returned. As she embraces his framed photo and caresses it as if it is the most fragile and most vulnerable living object in the world, the burden of talking about their son falls on the shoulders of his father.

“Only God knows if he is still alive or not. But it may be that they have beaten him to death. I overheard a conversation among the village guards. They were saying that our son had pleaded with them not to be killed. But they are paid for every person they kill,” he says.

When their original village, Kırkağaç, was evacuated, the İlbak family moved to Fındık village. İlhan İlbak was the eldest son of the family, and he was continuously urged to become a village guard.

“He did want to become a village guard. He was a good man, a nice guy. They were accusing him of being a supporter of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. They were accusing him of giving meals to his guests [members of the PKK],” he explains.

According to İsmet İlbak, the six people who were detained along with his son were taken away on a helicopter, but only one of them was released.

“After he took them to the location of a [terrorist] shelter, he was released. But, our son disappeared because he did not know any such location. The released person told us that they continuously beat my son,” he says.

İlhan’s father has referred his demand for justice to God, but he still mentions a name with hesitation: village guard Bahattin Aktuğ -- a.k.a. Baho Ağa -- who hosted Levent Ersöz, a defendant in the Ergenekon trial, in his house while the police were searching for him.

“He knows whether my son was killed or not. I went to him. I said to him, ‘Please, do not kill my son.’ He shrugged me off. Who will actually help me?” he asks.

He stares at his wife, who has been silently crying, and at his children running hither and thither in the room before pronouncing: “How I wished he were here at home, even if we could not find bread to eat tonight. I don’t care if we lived in a tent, as long as he would return. There are wells, it is said. Perhaps, a well is where they put him. No one knows. Only God knows.”

When İlhan disappeared, his father notes, he left behind a wife and two children, a girl baby who was still breastfeeding and a newly walking boy toddler.

“There is no grave for my son that I can stand atop and recite the Yasin [a surah from the Quran frequently recited as a supplication for the dead], but I go to cemeteries and recite the Yasin for the dead children of other people,” he says, and after a pause, adds quietly: “Sometimes, people give me money to recite the Yasin for their dead, and I can buy vegetables with this money. We make our living in this way. Barely, but we still thank God for it.”

‘Mehmet exists’

Human rights organizations and lawyers dealing with the missing persons’ cases cannot provide the exact number of people who disappeared in the 1990s. Still, according to their estimates, at least 1,200 people went missing. While it is a common desire among the relatives of the missing people to have a “grave to say supplications to,” their methods of commemorating their lost relatives and for surviving without their missing family members are different. Some, like the father of İlhan İlbak, recite the Yasin for the dead relatives of other people instead of doing this atop his own son’s grave, while others create a corner of remembrance in their houses. Some give the names of missing people to their newborn babies; Cemal Özdemir, who was 14 years old when his father, Mehmet Özdemir, disappeared in 1997, named his little brother -- born six months after the disappearance of his father -- Mehmet Hebun, meaning “Mehmet exists” in Kurdish.

“We have always told our mother this: ‘Mom, there may not be any meals in this house, but our sisters and brothers should always wear new and clean clothes. No one should find an opportunity to say that their father worked for nothing and his children were left behind without protection,’” Cemal Özdemir says.

He points out that they still live in their father’s shadow, so they do not smoke cigarettes in order to be worthy of him.

“We worked in İstanbul, but we never indulged in evil things. Even normal families would be hurled to and fro in İstanbul, but we tried to be what our father would want us to be. Everyone loved him. People show us respect because we are his children,” he says.

Before he disappeared, Mehmet Özdemir was the local executive of the People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) in Diyarbakır. He had been previously detained eight times.

“They took him away when he was in a teahouse. We thought he would be referred to the court and released afterwards, as it was with the previous detentions. But this is not what happened,” he says.

Cemal Özdemir explains that while they were searching for their father, their mother learned how to read and write, they received threats, even some of their close relatives stopped talking with them, they had to work in far-away cities in order to look after the family, they would jump every time the phone rang because it might bring news about their father, their mother’s health deteriorated and some ill-intentioned people came to them and said, “Your father is alive, and if you give us money, we will show you his location.” They just want justice and a grave to say prayers for, and they will not quit searching until they find a trace of their father. Even if Cemal Özdemir does not express it in words, his big calloused hands tell what he has gone through after his father disappeared. One is inclined to ask whether he has ever thought, “If only my father had not engaged in politics.” Özdemir pauses for sometime, staring in front of him.

“My father is still respected. If he had been an evil person, would they still have respect for him? ... I don’t know -- if things had been different, say, if he had some debts to pay back, or if he had been involved in evil things -- but as you can see this is a legitimate struggle, an effort to speak one’s own language.”

For Cemal Özdemir, the forces in the past that believed they could solve problems by causing people to disappear should now ponder why 8-year-old kids shout pro-Kurdish slogans; they should realize that making people disappear will not solve anything.

“If you wander in the mountains of Mesopotamia, you’ll see human bones everywhere. It follows that this business cannot be stopped through violence. I remember when the gendarmerie came to the village, we would conceal Kurdish cassettes. My little brother’s name is Mehmet Hebun, but the civil register did not accept it. Now there is a state-owned TV channel aired in Kurdish, and all sorts of Kurdish words are being used. Kurdish letters are used as well. If you would do this in the end, why has so much blood been spilled? If only this would have happened before 30,000 people died,” he says.

One missing person, four helpless women left behind

Mehmet Hebun is not the only child who was born after his father disappeared. Emine, who is currently 15 years old, was born two months after her father, Fikri Şen, had been taken with İlhan İlbak in a helicopter. Emine is her name in the civil register records. Her family prefers to call her Mizgin, meaning “good news” in Kurdish. They chose this name when they still had hopes for the return of her father. However, Mizgin, who was the first and only child of her parents, had neither an elder brother nor any other relative who would look after her.

Four people are waiting for us in front of the single-room house of Mizgin and her family in the muddy and dusty Cudi neighborhood, which was formed by migrants, in Cizre: Mizgin, her mother, Bedriye, her father’s sister, Vechiye, and her grandmother, Adile. Adile, who is wasting away from age and so weak that I can feel her individual bones, faints in my arms even before she can say hello. We carry Adile, who is as light as a feather, in and make sure she revives. The four women line up, leaning on a wall of the narrow room, and then Mizgin’s mother begins the story.

“I was married for two years. When our village was burned down in 1994, we moved to Fındık. The muhtar and the commander of the military outpost came at dawn to take away my husband. We thought, ‘We have no problems with the state, so why does this happen?’ We were afraid,” she sums up.

Feeling better, Adile adds in tears: “I ran after them. ‘Don’t take away my son,’ I cried. I threw myself in front of them. ‘Go to hell with your son,’ they swore,” she says.

Like the İlbak family, Adile accuses Baho Ağa: “I pleaded with them. ‘Don’t touch my son,’ I said. When Mizgin was only 6 days old, I put her in front of them and told them, ‘Give her back her father.’ They said to me, ‘Become a village guard, and we will give your son back.’ I told the father of my son, ‘Go and become a village guard, and bring back my son.’ But his father went, and returned, saying, ‘Our son might not be alive.’”

In the years of armed conflict, what Adile always feared was not the possibility of her son’s detention, but of his abduction by the PKK. She says that if her son had not died, there is only one way he could be alive. “I always dream of him in the mountains. If he is not dead, he must be there.”

What happened to Mizgin’s father is not known, but the Şen family disintegrated after his disappearance. Mizgin’s grandfather had a heart attack and died. Her two uncles and their children moved to Kayseri, fearful for their own lives.

“My sons ran away in a desperate attempt to save their lives. They are also indifferent. Since that time, they have been living away from us. They cannot help us. Only our neighbors help us. During Ramadan, they give us dinner.”

Adile says she wants to learn immediately whether her son is alive or not -- not because she would have a grave for him, but in order to free her daughter-in-law to remarry.

“She is a young woman. We might be needlessly forcing her to not marry any other man, making her wait for her husband.”

In this respect, Adile is different from many of the families with missing persons. Indeed, the young wives of the missing men tend to live with their fathers-in-law, waiting for husbands who might never return.

Mizgin complains about her uncles. She labors as an agricultural worker in the summer, but when she is asked about her performance in school, her eyes shine with excitement, and she wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. “My lessons are very good. I will become a lawyer to litigate my father’s case.”

ссылка

[DerVeris]

а что курды хотели когда помагали туркам резать армян??? теперь отвечать за то что сделали сами

[Gorec]

Вот именно,такие же преступники и пособники турецких живодеров, курды . Не мало их учавствовало в тех грязных злодеяниях начала 20 века,на территориях западной Армении. За все в этом мире отвечать надо. Или думали за то пособничество в геноциде армянского народа, их турки трогать не будут.

[zizou]

ARMIASKAIA pogovorka govarit

anaxuac qrdi shun na etom vse skazanno

[Banber]

ARMIASKAIA pogovorka govarit

anaxuac qrdi shun na etom vse skazanno

zizou, прямо в яблочко!!!

[Qwinto]

Пусть режут, взрывают, убивают друг друга сколько влезет. На данном историческом этапе нам это очень выгодно!

Из курдов только единицы понимают что сделали их предки по отношению к армянам во время Мец Егерна и до него это продолжалось десятилетиями.

Давно читал статью, курдскую о выгоде союза с армянами в 19-20 веках, там один их полит деятель очень сильно сокрушался что не армян а турок себе в союзники выбрали... теперь сами и страдают, и поделом!

[Gorec]

Пусть режут, взрывают, убивают друг друга сколько влезет. На данном историческом этапе нам это очень выгодно!

Из курдов только единицы понимают что сделали их предки по отношению к армянам во время Мец Егерна и до него это продолжалось десятилетиями.

Давно читал статью, курдскую о выгоде союза с армянами в 19-20 веках, там один их полит деятель очень сильно сокрушался что не армян а турок себе в союзники выбрали... теперь сами и страдают, и поделом!

От того у безмозговых и не будет никогда, своего государства и мнения,или наоборот.

[Spezzatura]

Между тем Израиль (преследуя тактические цели) уже 40 лет играет на курдах как на баяне.

Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.

The Israeli decision to seek a bigger foothold in Kurdistan—characterized by the former Israeli intelligence officer as “Plan B”—has also raised tensions between Israel and Turkey. It has provoked bitter statements from Turkish politicians and, in a major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran, Syria, and Turkey, all of which have significant Kurdish minorities. In early June, Intel Brief, a privately circulated intelligence newsletter produced by Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, and Philip Giraldi, who served as the C.I.A.’s deputy chief of base in Istanbul in the late nineteen-eighties, said:

Turkish sources confidentially report that the Turks are increasingly concerned by the expanding Israeli presence in Kurdistan and alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state. . . . The Turks note that the large Israeli intelligence operations in Northern Iraq incorporate anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity, including support to Iranian and Syrian Kurds who are in opposition to their respective governments.

Israeli involvement in Kurdistan is not new. Throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Israel actively supported a Kurdish rebellion against Iraq, as part of its strategic policy of seeking alliances with non-Arabs in the Middle East.

A top German national-security official said in an interview that “an independent Kurdistan with sufficient oil would have enormous consequences for Syria, Iran, and Turkey” and would lead to continuing instability in the Middle East—no matter what the outcome in Iraq is. There is also a widespread belief, another senior German official said, that some elements inside the Bush Administration—he referred specifically to the faction headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz—would tolerate an independent Kurdistan. This, the German argued, would be a mistake. “It would be a new Israel—a pariah state in the middle of hostile nations.”

“Israel’s immediate goal after June 30th is to build up the Kurdish commando units to balance the Shiite militias—especially those which would be hostile to the kind of order in southern Iraq that Israel would like to see,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Of course, if a fanatic Sunni Baathist militia took control—one as hostile to Israel as Saddam Hussein was—Israel would unleash the Kurds on it, too.” The Kurdish armed forces, known as the peshmerga, number an estimated seventy-five thousand troops, a total that far exceeds the known Sunni and Shiite militias.

The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel’s most secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American commando units had been unable to do—penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq. (I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) “The feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency,” the former officer said. “But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey.”

The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said, “Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way—as balance against Saddam. It’s Realpolitik.” He added, “By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.” He went on, “What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush Administration.”

Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes. Syrian and Lebanese officials believe that Israeli intelligence played a role in a series of violent protests in Syria in mid-March in which Syrian Kurdish dissidents and Syrian troops clashed, leaving at least thirty people dead. (There are nearly two million Kurds living in Syria, which has a population of seventeen million.) Much of the fighting took place in cities along Syria’s borders with Turkey and Kurdish-controlled Iraq. Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, told me that while the disturbances amounted to an uprising by the Kurds against the leadership of Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, his government had evidence that Israel was “preparing the Kurds to fight all around Iraq, in Syria, Turkey, and Iran. They’re being programmed to do commando operations.”

At the moment, the former American senior intelligence official said, the Israelis’ tie to Kurdistan “would be of greater value than their growing alliance with Turkey. ‘We love Turkey but got to keep the pressure on Iran.’ ” The former Israeli intelligence officer said, “The Kurds were the last surviving group close to the United States with any say in Iraq. The only question was how to square it with Turkey.”

There may be no way to square it with Turkey. Over breakfast in Ankara, a senior Turkish official explained, “Before the war, Israel was active in Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very dangerous for us, and for them, too. We do not want to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore it.” Then, citing a popular Turkish proverb—“We will burn a blanket to kill a flea”—he said, “We have told the Kurds, ‘We are not afraid of you, but you should be afraid of us.’ ” (A Turkish diplomat I spoke to later was more direct: “We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey’s good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions.”)

In Ankara, another senior Turkish official explained that his government had “openly shared its worries” about the Israeli military activities inside Kurdistan with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “They deny the training and the purchase of property and claim it’s not official but done by private persons. Obviously, our intelligence community is aware that it was not so. This policy is not good for America, Iraq, or Israel and the Jews.”

остальное тут

[Asatryan]

The lives of families whose hopes for finding their missing relatives were renewed following the launching of the Ergenekon investigation are not easy. After their relatives disappeared, many of them had to move to other places and they became poorer.

The rest of their children had to quit school in order to find a job. Some of the relatives of the missing people stopped "uttering a single word" in order to express their protest and resentment. But some children, like Mehmet Hebun Özdemir and Mizgin Şen, were not yet born when their fathers disappeared.

Yasin recited over others' graves

"Because she suffers from a deep sorrow, she does not speak. She never speaks. She has been silent since that day," says İsmet İlbak, whose face is lined with deep wrinkles, pointing at his wife, Fatma. However, as soon as I step into the room that is full of children of all ages -- ranging from a sleeping infant in the cradle, a crawling toddler and several older kids who are drawing fake watches on their wrists -- Fatma puts her arms around me and starts to cry.

I discover that she is crying not from the sound of her sobs, but because of her tears rolling down onto me. Her deep-set eyes do the speaking. She makes some gestures with her thin-boned hands, and I occasionally hear feeble wheezing sounds.

By closing her mouth tight, Fatma has been protesting the disappearance of her son, İlhan İlbak, who was detained along with six other people in 1994; they were taken away in a helicopter and never returned. As she embraces his framed photo and caresses it as if it is the most fragile and most vulnerable living object in the world, the burden of talking about their son falls on the shoulders of his father.

"Only God knows if he is still alive or not. But it may be that they have beaten him to death. I overheard a conversation among the village guards. They were saying that our son had pleaded with them not to be killed. But they are paid for every person they kill," he says.

When their original village, Kırkağaç, was evacuated, the İlbak family moved to Fındık village. İlhan İlbak was the eldest son of the family, and he was continuously urged to become a village guard.

"He did want to become a village guard. He was a good man, a nice guy. They were accusing him of being a supporter of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party]. They were accusing him of giving meals to his guests [members of the PKK]," he explains.

According to İsmet İlbak, the six people who were detained along with his son were taken away on a helicopter, but only one of them was released.

"After he took them to the location of a [terrorist] shelter, he was released. But, our son disappeared because he did not know any such location. The released person told us that they continuously beat my son," he says.

İlhan's father has referred his demand for justice to God, but he still mentions a name with hesitation: village guard Bahattin Aktuğ -- a.k.a. Baho Ağa -- who hosted Levent Ersöz, a defendant in the Ergenekon trial, in his house while the police were searching for him.

"He knows whether my son was killed or not. I went to him. I said to him, 'Please, do not kill my son.' He shrugged me off. Who will actually help me?" he asks.

He stares at his wife, who has been silently crying, and at his children running hither and thither in the room before pronouncing: "How I wished he were here at home, even if we could not find bread to eat tonight. I don't care if we lived in a tent, as long as he would return. There are wells, it is said. Perhaps, a well is where they put him. No one knows. Only God knows."

When İlhan disappeared, his father notes, he left behind a wife and two children, a girl baby who was still breastfeeding and a newly walking boy toddler.

"There is no grave for my son that I can stand atop and recite the Yasin [a surah from the Quran frequently recited as a supplication for the dead], but I go to cemeteries and recite the Yasin for the dead children of other people," he says, and after a pause, adds quietly: "Sometimes, people give me money to recite the Yasin for their dead, and I can buy vegetables with this money. We make our living in this way. Barely, but we still thank God for it."

'Mehmet exists'

Human rights organizations and lawyers dealing with the missing persons' cases cannot provide the exact number of people who disappeared in the 1990s. Still, according to their estimates, at least 1,200 people went missing. While it is a common desire among the relatives of the missing people to have a "grave to say supplications to," their methods of commemorating their lost relatives and for surviving without their missing family members are different. Some, like the father of İlhan İlbak, recite the Yasin for the dead relatives of other people instead of doing this atop his own son's grave, while others create a corner of remembrance in their houses. Some give the names of missing people to their newborn babies; Cemal Özdemir, who was 14 years old when his father, Mehmet Özdemir, disappeared in 1997, named his little brother -- born six months after the disappearance of his father -- Mehmet Hebun, meaning "Mehmet exists" in Kurdish.

"We have always told our mother this: 'Mom, there may not be any meals in this house, but our sisters and brothers should always wear new and clean clothes. No one should find an opportunity to say that their father worked for nothing and his children were left behind without protection,'" Cemal Özdemir says.

He points out that they still live in their father's shadow, so they do not smoke cigarettes in order to be worthy of him.

"We worked in İstanbul, but we never indulged in evil things. Even normal families would be hurled to and fro in İstanbul, but we tried to be what our father would want us to be. Everyone loved him. People show us respect because we are his children," he says.

Before he disappeared, Mehmet Özdemir was the local executive of the People's Democracy Party (HADEP) in Diyarbakır. He had been previously detained eight times.

"They took him away when he was in a teahouse. We thought he would be referred to the court and released afterwards, as it was with the previous detentions. But this is not what happened," he says.

Cemal Özdemir explains that while they were searching for their father, their mother learned how to read and write, they received threats, even some of their close relatives stopped talking with them, they had to work in far-away cities in order to look after the family, they would jump every time the phone rang because it might bring news about their father, their mother's health deteriorated and some ill-intentioned people came to them and said, "Your father is alive, and if you give us money, we will show you his location." They just want justice and a grave to say prayers for, and they will not quit searching until they find a trace of their father. Even if Cemal Özdemir does not express it in words, his big calloused hands tell what he has gone through after his father disappeared. One is inclined to ask whether he has ever thought, "If only my father had not engaged in politics." Özdemir pauses for sometime, staring in front of him.

"My father is still respected. If he had been an evil person, would they still have respect for him? ... I don't know -- if things had been different, say, if he had some debts to pay back, or if he had been involved in evil things -- but as you can see this is a legitimate struggle, an effort to speak one's own language."

For Cemal Özdemir, the forces in the past that believed they could solve problems by causing people to disappear should now ponder why 8-year-old kids shout pro-Kurdish slogans; they should realize that making people disappear will not solve anything.

"If you wander in the mountains of Mesopotamia, you'll see human bones everywhere. It follows that this business cannot be stopped through violence. I remember when the gendarmerie came to the village, we would conceal Kurdish cassettes. My little brother's name is Mehmet Hebun, but the civil register did not accept it. Now there is a state-owned TV channel aired in Kurdish, and all sorts of Kurdish words are being used. Kurdish letters are used as well. If you would do this in the end, why has so much blood been spilled? If only this would have happened before 30,000 people died," he says.

One missing person, four helpless women left behind

Mehmet Hebun is not the only child who was born after his father disappeared. Emine, who is currently 15 years old, was born two months after her father, Fikri Şen, had been taken with İlhan İlbak in a helicopter. Emine is her name in the civil register records. Her family prefers to call her Mizgin, meaning "good news" in Kurdish. They chose this name when they still had hopes for the return of her father. However, Mizgin, who was the first and only child of her parents, had neither an elder brother nor any other relative who would look after her.

Four people are waiting for us in front of the single-room house of Mizgin and her family in the muddy and dusty Cudi neighborhood, which was formed by migrants, in Cizre: Mizgin, her mother, Bedriye, her father's sister, Vechiye, and her grandmother, Adile. Adile, who is wasting away from age and so weak that I can feel her individual bones, faints in my arms even before she can say hello. We carry Adile, who is as light as a feather, in and make sure she revives. The four women line up, leaning on a wall of the narrow room, and then Mizgin's mother begins the story.

"I was married for two years. When our village was burned down in 1994, we moved to Fındık. The muhtar and the commander of the military outpost came at dawn to take away my husband. We thought, 'We have no problems with the state, so why does this happen?' We were afraid," she sums up.

Feeling better, Adile adds in tears: "I ran after them. 'Don't take away my son,' I cried. I threw myself in front of them. 'Go to hell with your son,' they swore," she says.

Like the İlbak family, Adile accuses Baho Ağa: "I pleaded with them. 'Don't touch my son,' I said. When Mizgin was only 6 days old, I put her in front of them and told them, 'Give her back her father.' They said to me, 'Become a village guard, and we will give your son back.' I told the father of my son, 'Go and become a village guard, and bring back my son.' But his father went, and returned, saying, 'Our son might not be alive.'"

In the years of armed conflict, what Adile always feared was not the possibility of her son's detention, but of his abduction by the PKK. She says that if her son had not died, there is only one way he could be alive. "I always dream of him in the mountains. If he is not dead, he must be there."

What happened to Mizgin's father is not known, but the Şen family disintegrated after his disappearance. Mizgin's grandfather had a heart attack and died. Her two uncles and their children moved to Kayseri, fearful for their own lives.

"My sons ran away in a desperate attempt to save their lives. They are also indifferent. Since that time, they have been living away from us. They cannot help us. Only our neighbors help us. During Ramadan, they give us dinner."

Adile says she wants to learn immediately whether her son is alive or not -- not because she would have a grave for him, but in order to free her daughter-in-law to remarry.

"She is a young woman. We might be needlessly forcing her to not marry any other man, making her wait for her husband."

In this respect, Adile is different from many of the families with missing persons. Indeed, the young wives of the missing men tend to live with their fathers-in-law, waiting for husbands who might never return.

Mizgin complains about her uncles. She labors as an agricultural worker in the summer, but when she is asked about her performance in school, her eyes shine with excitement, and she wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. "My lessons are very good. I will become a lawyer to litigate my father's case."

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Сообщение #1321

Сообщение #1322

Сообщение #1325

[Spezzatura]

Bones of the missing

By Sarah Rainsford

Under armed guard, a team of excavators opened up a disused well shaft behind an abandoned roadside restaurant in south-eastern Turkey.

They were searching for the remains of hundreds of civilians who disappeared at the height of the Kurdish separatist conflict in this region in the 1990s.

Many were last seen with members of Turkey's security forces.

For many Kurdish families, the dig marked the start of a long-stalled search for justice. More than 70 have now applied to local lawyers for help to find their relatives.

"Our first demand is to find the bones of the missing," lawyer Abdulaziz Tokay explains.

"But the most important thing is to identify those responsible for their disappearance and punish them."

The dig at this site unearthed several bones and pieces of cloth. They have been sent for DNA testing while the search goes on.

The Tanis family is one of many watching these unprecedented events closely.

Eight years ago, Serdar Tanis had just opened a local branch of the pro-Kurdish HADEP party. On 25 January 2001, he was summoned to the regional gendarme base.

Witnesses saw him enter the compound with a colleague, Ebubekir Deniz, before they both disappeared.

For six days, staff at the base denied the politicians had ever been there. On the seventh day, they said the two had left to join separatist PKK insurgents in the mountains.

"Serdar's only crime was to be district chairman of a perfectly legal political party," his brother Yakup says.

"The Turkish state said there were no Kurds then, everyone was a Turk. But HADEP said: 'We exist and have rights.' The state saw that as a threat," he explains.

Rifling through thick case files, the family's lawyer, Tahir Elci, pulls out what he says is a letter written by Serdar Tanis to Turkey's interior minister, days before he disappeared.

In it, he said he had received death threats from the regional gendarme commander.

The European Court of Human Rights found the letter, and other evidence, "credible and convincing".

In 2005, it found Turkey guilty of violating Mr Tanis' and Mr Deniz's right to life.

But in Turkey, the case has been blocked, says Mr Elci.

"The serious problem in Turkey about human rights is impunity," he says.

He estimates that more than 1,000 Kurds disappeared at the height of the conflict between the security forces and PKK rebels fighting for a separate Kurdish state.

"It is impossible to touch the security forces for their crimes against civilians," Mr Elci says. "Many victims are still looking for justice."

Public confession

But something significant has just changed.

Dozens of men are now on trial in Turkey, accused of forming an ultra-nationalist gang called Ergenekon and plotting to overthrow the government.

For the first time, senior security officers are among the suspects - including many notorious to most Kurds.

Lawyers here have petitioned prosecutors to expand the Ergenekon case and launch a proper investigation into the fate of the missing.

There are already some clues.

Just outside Silopi, a small circle of white stones in the middle of a field marks the spot where the body of Murat Aslan was found.

He vanished in 1995, after witnesses saw him being forced into a car in the city of Diyarbakir by security forces.

Years later, his father read the newspaper confession of a former informer for a shadowy branch of the gendarmes widely known as JITEM. The existence of JITEM has never been formally acknowledged.

The informer, Abdulkadir Aygan, claimed JITEM tortured and burned Murat Aslan as a suspected PKK sympathiser.

The informer gave the location of his grave, and claimed such practice was routine. He said JITEM felt untouchable.

The Aslan family filed a court case, but the gendarme commander at the time ignored requests for a statement. The prosecutor never even drafted an indictment.

Gendarme headquarters in Ankara declined a request to respond to allegations of abuses. But the unprecedented arrests in the Ergenekon trial have emboldened others to speak out.

Adnan Ekmen was state minister for human rights when Turkey's fight against the PKK was at its fiercest.

"The mentality here is this: if the existence of the state is at stake, illegal action is legitimate," he told the BBC.

"There were dozens of unsolved killings then, thousands of human rights violations. But our ministry was merely symbolic. We were powerless."

The Ergenekon case is vast - and still expanding - with new arrests and claims almost daily. Critics accuse the government of using the trial to punish opponents.

But in the south-east, many Kurds are pinning high hopes on the case.

"I think the Ergenekon trial is a great moment for Turkey, no matter where it leads," lawyer Abdulaziz Tokay says.

"No-one would've thought a general could be tried in this country. It's a sign Turkey has taken a step towards the rule of law."

Yakup Tanis tells me that since the excavations began, his family has received anonymous phone calls, warning them not to push too far.

But he is determined to discover what happened to his brother - and to find him.

"We want Turkey to finally confront that era," he says, a picture of Serdar propped against the wall beside him. "We want the people responsible for those crimes to be convicted."

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[Spezzatura]

Police detain DTP members in massive anti-PKK operation

Nearly 50 people, the majority of whom are members of a pro-Kurdish political party, were detained yesterday in operations conducted across 13 cities at the order of the Diyarbakır Prosecutor’s Office over alleged links to the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Officials said raids were the culmination of a year-long investigation into the PKK’s “urban extensions.”

The operations, which have largely targeted members of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), were conducted simultaneously at 90 locations across 13 cities including Diyarbakır, Adana, Ankara, Aydın, Elazığ, Gaziantep, İstanbul, Mardin, Şanlıurfa, Şırnak, Bingöl and Hakkari. Three of the party’s deputy chairmen and deputy mayors were also detained. The suspects are being charged with membership in the terrorist PKK organization, working to promote the politicization of the PKK and inciting acts of vehicle arson perpetrated by PKK sympathizers in some cities.

Seracettin Irmak, a lawyer for the PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan, is also among the detained. Some of the key DTP members in custody include Deputy Chairman Kamuran Yüksek, Deputy Chairman Bayram Altun, Deputy Chairwoman Selma Irmak, Bartın Mayor’s Office Public Works Director Heval Erdemli, Tunceli Deputy Mayor Halil Ünlü and Diyarbakır Mayor Osman Baydemir’s prime aide, Ahmet Zirek.

In the Ankara operations, nobody was detained but houses were searched. DTP member Mustafa Sayar’s house in Balgat, DTP Deputy Chairman Yüksek’s house in Yenimahalle and another house in Dikmen, used as a meeting point for DTP youth organizations, were searched and some documents seized.

The first response from the DTP came from its chairman, Ahmet Türk, who said the investigation was an attempt to push the DTP out of democratic politics. “These kinds of operations and pressures are the sign of a new era in which our party is being pushed away from the democratic struggle. But everybody should know that we will not give up,” he said while addressing the DTP’s parliamentary group.

In the same speech Türk suggested that some forces in Turkey are trying to take the country into a violent phase in the light of these provocations. “If they insist on clashes, everything will be worse than the past. If the ship sinks, all of us will drown,” he added.

Some observers note that the operations came one day after the DTP called on the state to recognize the PKK as a valid counterpart in the talks to find a solution for the Kurdish question; however, security forces claimed that the operation against the DTP had been planned for a long time.

The DTP mayors newly elected in the local elections on March 29, the administrative boards and the rank-and-file of the DTP met over the weekend in Ankara and discussed the party’s new policies. It was on Monday, after the meeting, that the DTP made an announcement suggesting the PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving a life sentence on İmralı Island in the Sea of Marmara, should be treated as counterparts in the quest to find a solution to the Kurdish problem. Although the government, European Union and the United States made frequent recommendation to the DTP to make a distinction between itself and the PKK, the party refused to do so. The DTP did not denounce the PKK as a terrorist organization -- exactly the opposite; after the overwhelming success in the local elections in Kurdish- populated areas, the DTP decided to step up its policy sanctioning the PKK. According to DTP officials, their campaign during the local elections based on Kurdish identity paid off, and the support of the voters meant acceptance of the suggestion.

“The world will take time to analyze the results of the local elections. We will not change, but the world has to accept us as we are,” a DTP official said while explaining their new strategy. “Our party thinks that the local elections will give a new direction to the politics of Turkey, and in this new era the mission of our party will be greater than the past,” the DTP announced on Monday.

The DTP was expecting that after their success in the local elections, there would either be amendments in the anti-terror laws or constitutional changes relating to party closures and that the situation will either be resolved or the former policies will continue.

There is a closure case against the DTP at the Constitutional Court with the claim that it has become of the focus of separatist activities. The indictment of the closure case also demands a political ban for 221 persons, some of them the newly elected mayors and deputies. “When we take into consideration the election results, we do not think the DTP will be closed down politically,” the same official told Today’s Zaman a couple of days ago.

“This is the first time the idea of a solution to the Kurdish question in a non-conflict atmosphere has emerged,” the PKK declaration underlined. The same declaration also underlined the importance of the local elections and claimed that “the local elections showed strongly that this situation cannot be solved without taking the DTP, PKK and Öcalan into consideration. Now there is a high expectation for solving the Kurdish problem with new policies.”

The same declaration claimed that ratification of the policies of the DTP brought responsibilities to the PKK and that in order to prove that that the Kurdish problem can be solved within the framework of democracy in a conflict-free atmosphere, the PKK will refrain from its attacks until June 1.

Selahattin Demirtaş, deputy chairman of the DTP parliamentary group, said the arrests were a politically motivated reaction to the DTP’s success in the local elections. “This is an illegal operation against the DTP and an attempt to manipulate the DTP’s political support and break its will,” Demirtaş told Reuters in a telephone interview. “It’s no coincidence the operation comes so soon after the election.” DTP deputy Hasip Kaplan echoed this opinion and added, “We get used to operations against us, but these operations are risking the search for solutions.” Emine Ayna, a DTP deputy chairwoman, also spoke to the press yesterday, sharing her views on the detentions. She said both the cause and the consequences of the operation were “dangerous.” She reiterated Türk’s position that the operation was an attempt to push the DTP out of legitimate politics.

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[Spezzatura]

Turkey Begins Dig for Missing Kurds

By Dorian Jones

Diyarbakir, Turkey

State prosecutors in Turkey have ordered the excavation of several sites around Turkey that they say may hold Kurdish victims of state death squads from the 1980s and 1990s, a step ahead in efforts to force the country's security establishment to come clean about past abuses. Local human rights groups accuse the security forces of being responsible for more than 1,500 disappearances. There is growing hope that the missing will be found.

A search is taking place on land owned by a state oil company for the remains of people believed to be victims of a war waged by the Turkish state against the Kurdistan Workers party, the PKK.

For people living in the region they are simply known as the missing.

The region's main city of Diyarbakir is where many families of those who disappeared live.

Muhlise Adiguzel and her three children moved here from their village after her husband Vehdettin, an activist in Kurdish politics, disappeared one wintry night 15 years ago.

"Late one late night we were sitting with relatives then there was banging on the door, and shooting," she said. "Soldiers came in, blindfolded and tied my husband's hands and took him to another room. They then burned plastic on him. Then they took him away. My family petitioned the courts, but they said they have not seen him."

Muhlise says a man once did approach her from the state, offering her financial support for her family, if she agreed to be an informer. His advice was chilling: Your husband chose the wrong way, don't make the same mistake. She refused.

Instead she, like so many others looking for their loved ones, ended up at the Diyarbakir Human Rights Association.

When I visit, another family is waiting to hear if there is any news of their missing husband and father. Despite the office being bombed and numerous police raids and court cases against its members, the association has been at the forefront of searching for the missing for the last 15 years. At present it has 275 open cases. But as its head Mumharem Erbey explains, their search continues to grow.

"As far as we know there are 1,500 people missing, but there can be far more. Many people were too frightened to report missing people, and just left the area. But now we are hearing from them because for all these people it is so important to find their loved ones," he said. "In our culture it is so important to have a ceremony to bury your dead. Without it, these people can't mourn. They live in a limbo, unable to move on."

The conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdish separatists reached its peak in the 1990s, claiming thousands of lives.

Retired brigadier general Haldun Solmazturk served for much of the 1990s fighting the PKK.

"You have to understand the situation. The very existence of the Turkish state was challenged. You know in the military you are either aggressive or you are losing. So under such circumstances such things - missing persons - could of happened, I can imagine," he said. "If such things happened in the region not only as a former member of the Turkish army but as a Turkish citizen, I would like the Turkish government to use every measure to make sure these cases are fully solved and understood and the perpetrators found. Who ever committed to these crimes, this was not part of a military conflict it cannot not be, as a former professional soldier I cannot never accept that."

Solmazturk's hopes could one day be realized.

Human rights groups have long claimed that many of the excesses committed in the conflict were carried out by Jitem, an arm of Turkey's military police that human rights groups and local residents in southeastern Turkey blame for many of the killings of Kurds. The Turkish military denies the existence of Jitem, or any role related to the disappearance and extrajudicial murder of Kurds.

Now its activities have to come to light as part of a court case. Several of the leading suspects in the case are believed to be former members of Jitem. The 68 suspects are on trial in Istanbul on charges of participating in an ultranationalist network known as Ergenekon that attempted to overthrow the West-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The ultranationalists oppose efforts by Mr. Erdogan and his government to pursue membership in the European Union. To join the bloc, Turkey is expected to revamp its legal system and make its once-untouchable security forces more accountable, lending impetus to government efforts to resolve claims relating to Kurdish disappearances.

Abdurmann Kurt represents the region in the Turkish parliament, and is a member of the ruling AK party. He says the investigation is key to bringing peace to the region.

"For giving this feeling that the state is trying to create a justice in society, we need to find things that happened in the past times to find the responsible people of these kind of actions, who behaved not according to the laws and they had done lots of crimes against the society," he said. "If we find the responsible people of these kind of actions, I think this will really give a deep justice feeling to the Kurdish society especially and this will help to solve the Kurdish question, too, I think."

The search for the victims has been aided by information in a book published in 2004, by a former member of Jitem, Abdulkadir Aygan, that gave details of 28 murders and the locations of remains. Families of the missing also contributed information to aid the excavations.

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[Spezzatura]

Anti-terrorism police raided the Istanbul province headquarters of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) -- Turkey's only legal Kurdish party which is represented in parliament -- in the early hours of Friday morning.

The police seized documents and computer hard drives and later detained the chairman of the DTP's regional office, Halil Aksoy.

The raid followed a police round-up on Tuesday of about 53 suspected PKK organizers, including three lawyers working for the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

The DTP has long been suspected of having ties with the Kurdish separatist group, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Turkey and the European Union.

DTP strongly denies the allegations.

The sweeping detentions come as Turkey seeks to isolate the rebels, based mainly in northern Iraq.

The 25-year-long separatist conflict has claimed over 44,000 lives, leaving a negative impact on Turkey's political and economic development.

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