The Comment Factory

On Tuesday Turkey’s buried history of repression against their Kurdish minority came back to haunt them in tragic circumstances.

The massacre of 44 people at a wedding in the village of Bilge in the southeast of the country has been called the “biggest massacre in the history of modern Turkey”, but its roots lie in a longer history of massacre and murder from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s, during the 15-year counterinsurgency operation the Turkish state waged against the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

The PKK was created in 1984 with the aim of establishing an independent Kurdistan in the Turkish south-east to protect a Kurdish minority that had never been recognized in Ataturk’s Republic, which had tried squeezed all the multifarious races and creeds populating Anatolia under the largely mythical ethnic designation “Turkish”. Kurds have banned from speaking their own language or teaching their own history, and their ethnicity still doesn’t even appear on the census form.

But the tactics of the Turkish government in combating the Kurdish intifada in the 1980s was straight out of the tactics handbook of the British Empire the Turks had fought and beaten in their own War of Independence. In 1985 the Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, who was a close friend of Margaret Thatcher, co-opted a small elite in the Kurdish villages of the south-east and plied them with weapons and orders to do battle with the PKK.

These paramilitary units, called Village Guards, were entrusted by the Turkish government to police the south-east from within and a blind eye was turned as they committed all sorts of atrocities. Human Rights Watch say they have opposed the village guard system since 1987, the year they released their first report on the subject, State of Flux: Human Rights in Turkey. Even that early it documented emerging evidence of “brutality and corruption among village guards“.

The brutal 1990s state clampdown on the south-east, under the guise of a War on Terror and furnished with weapons by the Major government and Bill Clinton in the US, saw the destruction of hundreds of villages in a scorched earth policy, and the displacement of thousands of Kurdish civilians. But since then things have improved. Martial law in the area was lifted four years ago, the AKP has allowed the establishment of the first Kurdish-language station, and the imprisoning of Kurdish politicians and the shutting down of their parties has abated somewhat.

But in this period of glasnost and reconciliation under the AKP, the village guard system has been left in place, even as their raison d’etre has disintegrated. Now this has come back to haunt the Turks because the alleged assailants in the Bilge massacre were village guards, which means these were massacres facilitated by government guns.

In the aftermath of this horrid massacre, which has demonstrated this anachronistic feudal system in full-view, the AKP must be bold and eradicate these paramilitaries, which, in the absence of a real insurgency to police, have turned to everday criminality including bribery, extrajudicial murder and drug dealing. Their trajectory mirrors somewhat the current priorities of the IRA, which as the Troubles subsided dedicated themselves to criminality unrelated to any political cause.

There has already been a chorus of calls for the village guard system to be eradicated, and there have been precedents for this type of barbarism. In May 2005 the European Court of Human Rights found the Turkish government responsible for violating the right to life of six villagers from Çalpýnar on April 14, 1992, this was in the same province as the massacre this week. In December 2004 eight village guards were sentenced to life imprisonment for the killings. It’s time for this to end. Decommission the paramilities.