For example, it never occurred to me that I would never forget the 10-year-old Palestinian boy with his very long lashes -- the longest ones that I ever seen in my life -- and his murder by an Israeli attack when he was on his way home from school. I never thought that I would vividly remember the horrors that I witnessed in the garden of a school in Jerusalem right after a suicide attack in front of it. Likewise, I never thought that the most painful thorns pricking my heart would be from the stories that I listened to when I was preparing the series "Death wells: Ergenekon's Aceldama." The reason these stories were so painful stemmed not only from listening to stories related first-hand by the families of the missing persons, but also from the very fact that these evils took place in my own country. As long as the remains of these missing people lie in wells, our children will have difficulty living in peace and prosperity because the thorns that prick my heart will also plague the future since those who deny these crimes put law and democracy at the bottom of these wells, too.
Most of the missing people, like 13-year-old Davut, 70-year-old Fikri Özgen and Fikri Şen who left behind four desperate women -- including his daughter who was not born when he was taken away by a military helicopter -- disappeared in the 1990s. Since then, people in southeastern Anatolia have claimed that the remains of these missing persons were in "death wells." Several people also claimed that JİTEM, a clandestine gendarmerie intelligence unit set up in the late 1980s to counter ethnic separatism in the Southeast, was behind the killings of hundreds of people in the region in the 1990s. It was alleged that JİTEM summarily executed a large number of people, doused their bodies with acid and buried them in wells.
After a long struggle by the bar association of the city, this week in Şırnak excavations began and some remains, bones and clothes have been recovered. Only after these developments did the denial of these killings suddenly become more difficult -- yet, denials still exist.
I owe a great deal of thanks to my friend, Professor Selçuk Candansayar, who is a psychiatrist, for helping me prepare the questions I asked in the course of the series. Also, he explained something very important regarding the denial of the existence of death wells: People have a tendency to close their eyes when they witness a cruel act because they want to protect themselves. Witnesses tend to draw closer to the perpetrators of crimes than to the victims, out of fear they may become victims themselves, he explained.
Unfortunately this applies to Turkish society, too. Despite all the evidence, despite the stories of the victims, the denial is still very strong. Some are persistent in their denial because of their relationship with the perpetrators of these cruel acts. Their wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of these perpetrators. Some members of society do not want to accept the fact that these cruel acts actually happened in Turkey. While they were going on with their daily life, others -- regardless of age -- were taken into custody, tortured, killed and thrown into the death wells. When these cruel acts were taking place, they did not want to hear. After all these years, now that the bones are finally being discovered, they don't want to see them, either. Denial is the main obstacle to confronting the past, which is naturally a very painful process but also an important process, necessary for establishing a better life for all of us.
Lying in these death wells are not only remains of the victims of Ergenekon, but also the principles of law and democracy. Despite denials, the victims and principles will emerge from the wells to remove the thorns from our hearts.
