Turkey, resorting to military solutions alone, coupled with the denial of ethnic identity, varying from changing villages' original names to the massive internal displacement of hundreds of villagers in its 25-year fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), failed to win the war and, on the contrary, caused deep misery.
As the Ergenekon deep state investigations and trials have revealed, some officers and civilian state personnel have been involved in extrajudicial killings of an estimated 17,000 people, mostly Kurds. Col. Cemal Temizöz, for example, has been among those officers accused of several extrajudicial killings in the war-stricken, Kurdish-dominated southeastern parts of Turkey, as the indictment published earlier by the Diyarbakır Prosecutor's Office has revealed.
This traumatic internal conflict has also created over the years a web of dirty relationships among some officers, security forces, Kurdish clans and some members of state, standing as one of the major reasons in the prolonging of this “low intensity warfare” against the PKK. Arms smugglers and drug traffickers have been at work to extract benefits from this corrupt web of relations. Here is a quote from Le Monde diplomatique's July 1998 edition headlined, “Turkey's pivotal role in the international drug trade,” to display this web of relations:
“Western Europe is the principal target of this massive [drug] trafficking operation. However, most European governments prefer to maintain an embarrassed silence on Ankara's dealings, in the same way that they have refrained from open criticism of the destruction of 3,428 Kurdish villages and the displacement of more than three million Kurds by their Turkish allies.
However, on 22 January 1997 a German judge, Ralf Schwalbe, launched public accusations against the Turkish government in general and Tansu Çiller [then Turkish prime minister] in particular. These were taken up on by Tom Sackville, minister of state at the British Home Office, who stated in the Sunday Times on 26 January 1997 that 80 percent of the heroin seized in Britain came from Turkey, and that his government was concerned at reports that members of the Turkish police, and even of the Turkish government, were involved in drug trafficking.”
Le Monde diplomatique also quoted a report published by then-Turkish government Chief Prosecutor Kutlu Savaş that shows the appalling state of relationships in the Kurdish region of Turkey. It said: “In a report published on 28 January 1997, the Turkish government's chief inspector described how, in the juridical no-man's land of Kurdish south-eastern Turkey, the army's ‘special war' units were not just killing with impunity, but had also become involved in protection rackets, blackmail, rape and drug trafficking. The report also describes how the Turkish government handed over the security of a huge area -- around the towns of Siverek and Hilvan -- to the private army of tribal chief Sedat Bucak, a [then] member of parliament close to the former prime minister, Tansu Çiller, who thus acquired the power of life and death over the area's inhabitants.”
The latest Ergenekon investigation -- centered on the unconstitutional activities of the deep state, including unseating the current government, under which two separate trials have started while the initial session of a third one is due to take place on Sept. 7 -- has uncovered more evidence of long-established dirty relations linked to some important players in the state and previous governments.
In addition, the PKK has been earning millions of dollars per year not only from drug smuggling but also through its own businesses in various European countries, escaping the scrutiny of European security officials.
We only have a general idea, meanwhile, about the cost of this internal conflict since this cost, if calculated by the state, is not available to the public. Government spokesperson Cemil Çiçek put this cost at around $1 trillion in a public speech he made several months ago. But I am not sure if any governments or the military have the breakdown of the costs of this war.
Bearing in mind how the decades-long PKK conflict has created its own illegal structure, it is no coincidence that there have been fears of provocations against the latest government-initiated plan to solve its Kurdish problem. During an interview on TRT1 last Sunday, Ahmet Türk, chairman of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), warned against provocations to sabotage attempts to make reforms and create a psychological basis in Turkish society for a solution to the Kurdish problem.
These provocations, most likely, would be initiated by those who fear losing their lucrative but corrupt business gains from the PKK-related internal conflict.
