A Dark Past
By Trends • Mar 4th, 2009Interesting company.
The three occupants represented a cross-section of a clandestine cabal that was controlled by ultra-right-wing militants and then-serving generals in the armed services and the National Intelligence Organization.
The dead included Huseyin Kocadag, a senior police chief who commanded counterinsurgency units; Turkey’s most wanted gangster, Abdullah Catli, an ultra-nationalist wanted by Interpol who had led a ferocious ultra-right group whose crimes include shooting Pope John Paul II in 1981; and Catli’s blonde lover, Gonca Uz, a former beauty queen turned mafia hit-woman.
The only survivor was Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament for the conservative True Path Party and a prominent Kurdish warlord. He headed a 2,000-strong private army known as the Village Guards that was armed and funded by the military to fight fellow Kurds of the separatist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) in southeastern Anatolia. (In 1984, the PKK launched a separatist war that some 35,000 people perished in.)
Police found a small arsenal of weapons in the trunk of the mangled Mercedes, including several handguns fitted with silencers. Catli was carrying six different sets of identity documents signed by Turkey’s then-interior minister, Mehmet Agar, who had also signed a gun permit for Catli, a wanted fugitive and drug trafficker.
The accident proved to be a turning point in Turkish politics, exposing the links between the state, organized crime and terrorist death squads. Five days after the crash, Agar, former governor of Erzurum province and former national police chief, resigned from the government. He was saved from prosecution by his parliamentary immunity. Like so many other officials whose criminal links were uncovered, he never saw prison – the establishment took care of its own.
At Catli’s funeral, his political connections were on display. Tansu Ciller, leader of the centrist True Path Party who became Turkey’s first woman prime minister in June 1993, made no effort to mask her links with him. She lauded the convicted assassin and drug-dealer as a “great patriot” and declared: “Those who fire bullets or suffer their wounds in the name of this country, this nation, and this state, will always be respectfully remembered by us.”
