Former member describes JİTEM's reign of terror

Abdülkadir Aygan, a former member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and later a member of the illegal gendarmerie unit known as JİTEM, told Taraf stories of murders of various individuals, giving details about the crimes committed by gendarmerie officers who worked for JİTEM.

Aygan, who has been living in Stockholm for fear of his life since confessing, first came into the spotlight when an alleged former leader of JİTEM, Maj. Abdülkerim Kırca, was found dead in his home last week. Kırca’s death appeared to be a suicide.

Families of the victims of hundreds of unsolved murders accused Kırca of being behind most of the murders committed in Turkey’s East and Southeast in the ‘90s. A surge in the number of unsolved deaths coincides with the term he served in the region.

Aygan claimed that he had witnessed Kırca, who received the State Merit of Honor from former President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, kill three men with a gun in the southeastern city of Silopi. Aygan’s descriptions were printed in various newspapers on the day of Kırca’s suicide.

In the first section of a lengthy interview with Taraf’s Neşe Düzel, Aygan described how he joined JİTEM in 1990 as a PKK informant who had made use of Turkey’s partial-amnesty regulations, known as the “law of repentance,” in which terrorist organization members can get reduced punishment if they agree to cooperate. He said the person who recruited him was Col. Arif Doğan, currently in jail as a suspect in Ergenekon, a clandestine terrorist organization charged with plotting to overthrow the government. JİTEM is thought to be an important branch of the larger Ergenekon network. Among Ergenekon suspects are a not insignificant number of army retirees and officers on active duty. Aygan worked for JİTEM for nine years, starting in 1990. He said they were given their own guns, and they were hired as civil servants under Turkey’s Public Servants Law No. 657 with paycheck documents, tax cuts, benefits and the right to a state pension.

Aygan described how JİTEM worked: “They call their acts ‘operations.’ For example, you are suspicious of someone. Normally, security forces would file a criminal complaint on the basis of some evidence, and a court would decide if the person is guilty or not. That’s not what JİTEM is like. Those who had any relationship with the PKK were reported to JİTEM, which did its job.”

Aygan stated that, to JİTEM, “doing its job” meant “taking a person illegally, taking them to JİTEM headquarters, then questioning them there, then executing them, and then hiding, burning or burying their body. Depending on the importance of the person, sometimes the Gendarmerie Security Command would be notified, which in turn informed, or sometimes didn’t inform, the OHAL Governor’s Office.” OHAL was martial law in the Southeast that was declared against terrorism and remained in place throughout the ‘90s.

The estimates on unsolved murders in the region from those years reach as high as 20,000. Aygan, who says that figure sounds exaggerated, gave an estimate for Diyarbakır province. “In the 10 years I served in Diyarbakır, I would say the number of executions by JİTEM would be 600 or 700.” In response to a question on whether he’d killed anyone as a JİTEM member, Aygan replied, “I don’t want to answer this question.”

He said unsolved murders by JİTEM began in 1993 and continued until 1996, when some of the JİTEM and Ergenekon structure was partially exposed in a car accident in which a police chief and a mafia leader who was also a hit man for shady state-linked groups were killed together. “In those three years, unsolved murders peaked,” Aygan said.

“All JİTEM operations always ended in death. As an example, there was a young man rumored to be a PKK member. His family had immigrated to Diyarbakır from Lice. He lived in the Şehitlik neighborhood. That young man was taken to JİTEM, questioned. Later, he was shot with a bullet in the head and left in an empty field. But later I heard from Abdülkerim Kırca, that, it turned out, he wasn’t killed by the bullet shot into his brain. He was only shocked. He walked to Batman and went to the hospital. He told about what he had been through, after which, the Batman team informed Kırca on the phone and explained the situation.” Aygan said the young man was killed in the hospital later on.

Aygan said people were generally strangled with wires or electric cables. “Torture would last usually one or two nights. They weren’t killed right away. They were even given some bread so they wouldn’t die before being interrogated.”

He recalled the details of another murder. “There was a university kid named Servet Aslan. He had a girlfriend from Mersin named Fatma. There were no allegations against her. She had nothing to do with it. Based on testimony from Serpil [Toprak], who was an informant like us, these two were taken from the center of Diyarbakır as they walked hand in hand. The kid had never joined the PKK. He had his girlfriend. They led a completely normal life. No PKK member would walk hand-in-hand with his girlfriend in the city center. They killed them both, even though he cried, saying he wasn’t a PKK member. Both were questioned and tortured. Abdülkerim Kırca himself tortured that girl.”