JİTEM is believed to be behind the disappearance of countless Kurds in the Kurdish-dominated Southeast in the mid-to-late '90s. The court asked the General Staff whether or not there is a unit called JİTEM; if there is, when it was established; whether or not it is currently functioning; and whether or not the people named in the indictment in question are members of it.
Signed by Judge Orhan Önder of Criminal Legal Affairs on behalf of the General Staff, the response stated that “there is no unit called JİTEM formed under the General Staff.”
The General Staff has denied the existence of JİTEM before. In another statement in February of this year, the General Staff had said that there is no truth to news stories regarding the testimony of İbrahim Şahin, the former deputy chief of the National Police Department’s Special Operations Unit, who said he was ordered by a general to assemble members of the Special Operations Unit into death squads to assassinate community leaders.
Şahin had claimed in his testimony that Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ had ordered an assassination squad of 150 to 300 people to be established. Şahin was convicted earlier in a similar investigation into a gang exposed in 1996 when a police chief and an internationally sought mafia boss died in the same vehicle in a car accident near Susurluk.
In a report prepared by the Prime Ministry on the Susurluk affair, Kutlu Savaş, the author of the report, had written that JİTEM was under control of the Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia Security Army Corps.
“Even though the Gendarmerie General Command denies this, the existence of JİTEM cannot be denied. Perhaps JİTEM was destroyed and eliminated at some point, with its personnel and records sent to different places. But many of the officers who worked in JİTEM are alive,” Savaş’s report said.
JİTEM is also thought to be an instrumental arm of the illegal organization called Ergenekon, which is charged with plotting against the government.
Abdülkadir Aygan, a former member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and later a member of JİTEM, gave spine-chilling details about crimes committed by gendarmerie officers who worked for JİTEM. Aygan, who has been living in Stockholm in fear of his life since confessing, had said JİTEM members were given their own guns and 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. He also had said the person who recruited him was Col. Arif Doğan, currently in jail as a suspect in Ergenekon.
Meanwhile, former Gendarmerie General Command (JGK) head retired Gen. Necati Özgen said recently on a television interview: “The people they call JİTEM are also military officers. They are our own people.” His remarks on journalist Can Dündar’s program have been interpreted as an admission of JİTEM’s existence.
Benzer Haberler 
National
