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It was Yaşar Büyükanıt, one of the top generals whose word once upon a time weighed more than any other's here. When he was serving as the Chief of General Staff some five years ago, "Mothers of Saturday" were also busy trying to have their desperate voices heard in the midst of the Pera District of Istanbul, of their "lost" loved ones; you know those who went "missing" in the darkness of the 1990's.
So, when a bureaucrat-turned-politician, Mehmet Ağar, spoke of the pain in the southeastern provinces, asked to stop "the crying of the mothers," the four-star general responded to him harshly. "Well, he (Ağar) probably means those Saturday's mothers, doesn't he?" Büyükanıt told the press, in a despicably arrogant and cynical manner. It was months before the big events, such as Dink's murder and the infamous e-memo against the government.
Times are changing. Some brave prosecutors continue to probe the crimes of 20 or so years ago, as the number of skulls and skeletons dug up in Diyarbakır since Jan. 11 has reached 25.
Truth is like that. It chases and haunts; it has that habit of never going away for good. Now, as Büyükanıt is anxiously awaiting the results of various investigations encircling the top brass of this and that allegation on abuse of power, the news about the skulls comes as a painful relief for many of those mothers of Saturday who for two decades had to suffer humiliation and harassment by the authorities and the systematic indifference of the so-called "mainstream media."
What has been uncovered since Jan. 11 in areas that belonged to the much-feared JITEM facilities are the ghosts of the past. The tide is turning, and as more discoveries are made, newspapers like Zaman and Radikal report extensive, heart-wrenching accounts of the members of Kurdish families who still live with the hope of reuniting with their sons and daughters.
Other segments of the press are less enthusiastic, but progress is noted. Day after day, we experience a country, a society that in a slow-motion manner wakes up from a world of lies, of cover ups. The notorious JITEM -- a derivative of the Turkish "Gladio" structures, adopted to conduct a massive dirty war against the [Kurdistan Workers' Party] PKK-led Kurdish insurgency in the 1990s, under the protection of the rules of the Emergency Rule -- is still a ghost from the past, which has to be legally and administratively confronted. Despite efforts in the late '90s -- by ex-Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz -- to expose its crimes, the generals until recently in sheer arrogance denied that JITEM even existed. "They were so fearless that they did not even bother to bury the victims' remains far away -- just buried them in their courtyard," Coşkun Üsterci from Human Rights Foundation (IHV) told the members of the Human Rights' Commission in Parliament the other day.
He told them he believed the number of "missing" may not be as high as 17,000-18,000 (as claimed by the BDP [Peace and Democracy Party]) but around 6,000-7,000. Certainly, the numeric differences do not matter. There are thousands of families who are traumatized by the fact that they do not know the fate of their relatives, and they want to bury them properly. Üsterci also presented a list of the "missings" in a chronological manner. The "peak" in summary executions and extrajudicial killings, he explained, was reached in 1990-94 at a time when the PKK escalated its warfare. The measures were apparently sanctioned at the highest level -- National Security Council (MGK) and the government -- under Süleyman Demirel and Tansu Çiller, who consequently were prime ministers. The number of those killed was 362 in 1992, 467 in 1993 and 423 in 1994. The skulls discovered in Diyarbakır are only the beginning, according to human rights activists. There are many eyewitnesses and "confessors" who will point out other spots. But, they also expect concrete and bold steps for taking everybody responsible to court. Everybody.
Unveiling the past, near or distant, is a huge task for the government, media and the citizens. Skulls are buried in the earth, and there is an immense number of skeletons in Ankara's political cupboards. It is now apparent to many people here that the painful, often bloody abuse of power under military tutelage was a work of continuity: Digging for the truth in the dark corners of the last decade leads to the ones hidden in the 1990s, which points to the 1980s and so on.
All this is happening as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government faces increasing pressure from critiques of slowing down, of pulling the brakes. Everything is piled up, as it were, and compressed -- surrounded by mass expectations of justice, closure and "never-again." "I know, some of you become impatient," said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan some days ago. "There are so many ill-deeds of the past. I wish we had a magic wand so that all of them were sent to the garbage bin of history, but we do not." He also promised that neither the Uludere incident nor the Dink case will be allowed to be "lost in the corridors" of Ankara. If he is sincere -- and for his own political task's sake, he must be -- the journey will have to go on; but, not half-heartedly. Winning the future of Turkey is to deal properly with its past.
Killing fields
It was Yaşar Büyükanıt, one of the top generals whose word once upon a time weighed more than any other's here. When he was serving as the Chief of General Staff some five years ago, "Mothers of Saturday" were also busy trying to have their desperate voices heard in the midst of the Pera District of Istanbul, of their "lost" loved ones; you know those who went "missing" in the darkness of the 1990's.
So, when a bureaucrat-turned-politician, Mehmet Ağar, spoke of the pain in the southeastern provinces, asked to stop "the crying of the mothers," the four-star general responded to him harshly. "Well, he (Ağar) probably means those Saturday's mothers, doesn't he?" Büyükanıt told the press, in a despicably arrogant and cynical manner. It was months before the big events, such as Dink's murder and the infamous e-memo against the government.
Times are changing. Some brave prosecutors continue to probe the crimes of 20 or so years ago, as the number of skulls and skeletons dug up in Diyarbakır since Jan. 11 has reached 25.
Truth is like that. It chases and haunts; it has that habit of never going away for good. Now, as Büyükanıt is anxiously awaiting the results of various investigations encircling the top brass of this and that allegation on abuse of power, the news about the skulls comes as a painful relief for many of those mothers of Saturday who for two decades had to suffer humiliation and harassment by the authorities and the systematic indifference of the so-called "mainstream media."
What has been uncovered since Jan. 11 in areas that belonged to the much-feared JITEM facilities are the ghosts of the past. The tide is turning, and as more discoveries are made, newspapers like Zaman and Radikal report extensive, heart-wrenching accounts of the members of Kurdish families who still live with the hope of reuniting with their sons and daughters.
Other segments of the press are less enthusiastic, but progress is noted. Day after day, we experience a country, a society that in a slow-motion manner wakes up from a world of lies, of cover ups. The notorious JITEM -- a derivative of the Turkish "Gladio" structures, adopted to conduct a massive dirty war against the [Kurdistan Workers' Party] PKK-led Kurdish insurgency in the 1990s, under the protection of the rules of the Emergency Rule -- is still a ghost from the past, which has to be legally and administratively confronted. Despite efforts in the late '90s -- by ex-Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz -- to expose its crimes, the generals until recently in sheer arrogance denied that JITEM even existed. "They were so fearless that they did not even bother to bury the victims' remains far away -- just buried them in their courtyard," Coşkun Üsterci from Human Rights Foundation (IHV) told the members of the Human Rights' Commission in Parliament the other day.
He told them he believed the number of "missing" may not be as high as 17,000-18,000 (as claimed by the BDP [Peace and Democracy Party]) but around 6,000-7,000. Certainly, the numeric differences do not matter. There are thousands of families who are traumatized by the fact that they do not know the fate of their relatives, and they want to bury them properly. Üsterci also presented a list of the "missings" in a chronological manner. The "peak" in summary executions and extrajudicial killings, he explained, was reached in 1990-94 at a time when the PKK escalated its warfare. The measures were apparently sanctioned at the highest level -- National Security Council (MGK) and the government -- under Süleyman Demirel and Tansu Çiller, who consequently were prime ministers. The number of those killed was 362 in 1992, 467 in 1993 and 423 in 1994. The skulls discovered in Diyarbakır are only the beginning, according to human rights activists. There are many eyewitnesses and "confessors" who will point out other spots. But, they also expect concrete and bold steps for taking everybody responsible to court. Everybody.
Unveiling the past, near or distant, is a huge task for the government, media and the citizens. Skulls are buried in the earth, and there is an immense number of skeletons in Ankara's political cupboards. It is now apparent to many people here that the painful, often bloody abuse of power under military tutelage was a work of continuity: Digging for the truth in the dark corners of the last decade leads to the ones hidden in the 1990s, which points to the 1980s and so on.
All this is happening as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government faces increasing pressure from critiques of slowing down, of pulling the brakes. Everything is piled up, as it were, and compressed -- surrounded by mass expectations of justice, closure and "never-again." "I know, some of you become impatient," said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan some days ago. "There are so many ill-deeds of the past. I wish we had a magic wand so that all of them were sent to the garbage bin of history, but we do not." He also promised that neither the Uludere incident nor the Dink case will be allowed to be "lost in the corridors" of Ankara. If he is sincere -- and for his own political task's sake, he must be -- the journey will have to go on; but, not half-heartedly. Winning the future of Turkey is to deal properly with its past.
Killing fields