The identity and employment history of 329 gendarmerie informants have been exposed in the dossiers of the Ergenekon indictment in Erzincan. A look at their careers leaves one in shock: Many of them are muhtars (neighborhood officials). A total of 57 muhtars secretly provide information to the gendarmerie. Then there are 69 farmers.
We can understand what the muhtars do, since they have access to everyone’s information and know who’s new and who’s gone. But what about the 69 farmers? What kind of information do they provide? What’s even more shocking and troubling is that among the informants are, brace yourself, university faculty, lawyers, engineers, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, nurses, imams, workers in the mufti’s office, community leaders, market owners, auto dealership owners and mayors. If I were to list them all it would include people from all professions.
This is a horrible thing. Yes, geographically, 92 percent of Turkey is under the jurisdiction of the gendarmerie. In other words, they are responsible in places where there are no police. But that is just a story. Forget places without police stations, the gendarmerie are engaging in intelligence-gathering work even in cities and towns. The gendarmerie was not assigned this duty.
You’re going to say the armed forces aren’t authorized to stage coups but do anyway. Are we out in the wild? Yes, any place where the law does not apply is considered “the wild.” Doesn’t the interior minister feel the need to make a statement about the gendarmerie informants?
But there’s another dimension to the issue. First of all, exposing the names of the informants put them at risk. People who have suffered in the past may hold them responsible. Furthermore, how are these people going to look their friends and family in the eye? How are they going to face their children and spouses? Some of them are already considering moving somewhere else.
Another issue is how so many people agreed to become informants so easily. I guess being a man of the state, obtaining what they see as a “privileged status” and seizing opportunities to make a profit appealed to these people. In other words, there’s a characteristic weakness at issue as well. The informants weren’t just providing information, they were also taking part in dirty jobs and bloody provocations. The person who bombed the bookstore in Şemdinli was a gendarmerie informant and a police informant was the main person involved in the killing of Hrant Dink. Infiltrating criminal gangs to gather intelligence is understandable. It’s like using a drug dealer to bust other drug dealers. But pay attention, we are talking about people who are members of a criminal gang. Now just think for a moment about a doctor, engineer, lecturer, teacher or lawyer. They are not infiltrators of a criminal organization, so what kind of information can they provide? It’s obvious that this is simply selling out and spying on others for personal gain.
There’s one more point I would like to highlight. Ultimately Erzincan is a small province. I wonder how many informants the gendarmerie has in all of Turkey? We used to hear how everyone was a spy in communist countries. They’ve collapsed but our status quo continues to resist change. But this issue is truly very important. That means if we consider all of Turkey, there must be informants around us left and right. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. We are talking about our friends, neighbors or coworkers. These people live among us.
Besides, what are these informants really informing about? What’s the appraisal? Are those on the left snitching on the left and those on the right snitching on the right? What are they snitching on? Recall the Sept. 12, 1980, period. Informants informed against hundreds of thousands of people. They caused them to be tortured and expelled from their professions. What kind of a country is this? What kind of people live in this country? This kind of intelligence gathering cannot be accepted. This kind of unlawfulness cannot be accepted. The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government needs to urgently address this unlawful and barbaric issue.
