Former minister Aşık: MİT has never attempted to solve ‘90s murders

The issues that occupy the political agenda in Turkey are usually obscure. We are always debating unsolved incidents. No political assassination that took place in the last 50 years in Turkey has been solved, and there is great resistance to information about these murders being revealed.

Two clear examples of this are the murders of Uğur Mumcu, a journalist killed after a bomb was planted on his automobile on Jan. 24, 1993, and Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was gunned down in broad daylight on Jan. 19, 2007, in front of the headquarters of the bilingual Armenian weekly, Agos, where he was editor-in-chief.

Another example is that of Eyüş Aşık, a prominent politician in the ‘90s. He served as a minister in the government that came to rule Turkey after the Feb. 28, 1997 postmodern coup, but Turks have come to associate him with the 1996 Susurluk affair, which centered on a car crash that revealed shady links between state officials and the mafia world, a number of unsolved murders and the parliamentary commission set up to investigate the murder of Uğur Mumcu. In other words, Turkey associates him with the mafia-deep state-politics triangle. “The military should not be undermined at any time as it has the potential to pose a threat to the government,” he generally stressed in interviews during his time as a former center-right politician. During an interview published in last week’s Aksiyon weekly, Aşık said the current Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has no problem with the military and that they are not in conflict with each other. In order to illustrate this relationship, he added: “The General Staff is cooperating with the current government. The data coming from the General Staff are more reliable and accurate than previously. The state has become accustomed to the AK Party and vice versa; they are not fighting.”

Highlighting that most military officers have a coup mentality, harboring ideas of toppling the government and seizing power, Aşık said arresting individuals in anti-coup cases such as a probe into Ergenekon, a crime network with links to both the state infrastructure and the military that has been accused of orchestrating a number of political murders and attacks designed to trigger an eventual military takeover, won’t eliminate this coup mentality. Aşık suggested that the reason the military has failed to successfully stage a coup in recent years is that Turkey is going through a relatively stable period, unlike the previous few decades. It hasn’t experienced any major crises, and coup perpetrators can no longer draw Turkey into chaos by simply killing individuals such as Hrant Dink or bombing bookstores.

On the question of why the ‘90s were filled with so many unsolved incidents, Aşık said the reasons behind the chaos that occurred in Turkey in the ‘90s were the ineffective politics of coalition governments and a power vacuum. Aşık added: “State officials were willing to overlook the law being broken in the fight against terrorism at that time. Police chiefs and commanders who didn’t like Kurds were justifying illegal acts under the pretense of fighting terrorism, but this kind of mentality is not as prevalent now as it was in the 1990s.”

Regarding the high-ranking officers who were victims of unsolved murders, such as Gen Eşref Bitlis, Gen. Hulusi Sayın, Gen. Bahtiyar Aydın and Col. Kazım Çillioğlu, Aşık said they were probably killed because of their opinions on the long-standing Kurdish question, suggesting these officers were regarded as incompatible with the convictions of other officers that oppression and violence were necessary in the fight against terrorism in Turkey.

In response to questions about the role of MİT in the ‘90s, Aşık said that the organization never made any contributions towards solving the murder cases, adding that MİT did not do its job properly. Hinting that MİT might be behind some of the unsolved incidents, Aşık said: “MİT did not try to resolve the incidents that occurred in the ‘90s, even though they should have been driving the investigations forward. MİT wasn’t doing its duty at that time, and it continues to avoid its responsibilities. I have not heard of a single case that has been solved with the help of MİT so far. If MİT doesn’t do anything, what exactly is their purpose?”