A Dark Past
By Trends • Mar 4th, 2009Official recognition.
At first, Turkish officials insisted that the police were transporting two captured criminals. But the identities of the crash victims and what they were carrying showed something more sinister was involved. Several senior law enforcement officers were suspended. Soon it became clear that leading government officials were part of the “deep state” being exposed to public scrutiny for the first time.
The crash gave Turks their first true glimpse of how deep-rooted the corruption and skullduggery pervading their government and state institutions really were. It stirred intense public outrage and led to investigations by the government and another by parliament.
Both commissions, in 1997, complained that military and police agencies impeded their probes by withholding a wide range of information, sometimes citing national security. But the commissions officially acknowledged that there were ties between the state, organized crime, drug lords and the extra-judicial killing of hundreds of people, including intelligence agents.
Leftwingers and liberals have been targeted over the years, but the slaughter was at its bloodiest in southeastern Anatolia, heartland of the separatist PKK. A report by a special prosecutor released in January 1998 said that there were some 17,000 unsolved murder cases before the courts in Anatolia. Many, if not most of them, were presumably sanctioned by the state. All remain open to this day.
