RIGHTS-TURKEY: Semdin Sakik’s Words Echo In The Kurdish War Zone

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadire Mater

ISTANBUL, May 12 1998 (IPS) - Turkey’s soldiers have spent 14 years in vicious but inconclusive conflict with the guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Now they say, the endgame is at hand.

And many believe that victory, if it comes, could be down to the guidance of one man — a Kurd.

Semdin Sakik, 40, who led the PKK in battle for more than a decade, is said to have told all after being grabbed in a daring snatch operation by a Turkish special forces unit in February.

Armed with his information the Turkish army launched their biggest assault yet, dubbed Operation Murat. Forty thousand troops backed by tanks and airpower smashed into the PKK’s heartland on Apr. 24 and are still razing the area. Turkey’s Anatolian news agency reports Army claims that up to Monday 99 PKK cadres have been killed, nine wounded and 14 captured since the operation began.

Even though army spokesman, general Errol Ozkasnak, claims the operation was scheduled long ago and has nothing to do with Sakik, the media is full of leaked reports about his alleged confessions.

And thus Sakik’s words may yet allow the Turkish military the victory they have long sought over the PKK. The terrifying problem for the critics of the Turkish military — and there are many — is that Sakik did not save his words for his brother Kurds alone.

The media reports that Sakik made a string of confessions that allegedly finger dozens of the military’s critics: opposition MPs, human rights group leaders, journalists, naming them all as ‘paid agents’ of the PKK. The list includes two of Turkey’s best know prisoners of conscience, pro-Kurdish party MPs Leyla Zana and Hatip Dicle.

Anyone who disputes the army’s writ seems to have been named. Even the world renowned ‘Saturday Mothers’, the women who weekly take to the central Istanbul streets to protest the ‘disappearances’ of members of their family, are accused.

Some of the charges are wild. One reported confession attributes the 1986 assassination of Swedish premier Olaf Palme to a PKK hitman. This theory is contested by the Swedish police and the main witness, Palme’s wife.

But accuracy is not the main issue at hand here. Most of the named believe that the charges, whether or not really made by Sakik, are a meant as a direct threat. Unknown assassins have already claimed the lives of dozens of opposition journalists, rights workers and MPs in Turkey.

Shortly after it was reported that Sakik had described the pro- Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) as the “PKK’s conscription bureau,” HADEP members in Istanbul and the north west city of Bolu were attacked by pro-army members of the neo- fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP). Two died and two were seriously injured.

And the Saturday Mothers themselves came under police attack Saturday, with 11 arrests and several injuries.

Among the named, Mehmet Ali Birand and Cengiz Candar, two reputed foreign affairs analysts from the national daily Sabah have been forced to go on leave by their editors and security analyst Mahir Kaynak of the weekly Aktuel has been fired — “in compliance with the demand of the military”.

Generally those targeted are reputed for their calls for a peaceful end to the Kurdish conflict. Human Rights Association chairman Akin Birdal fears he may be arrested any moment.

“It’s a witch hunt,” says Saruhan Oluc, Freedom & Solidarity Party (ODP) deputy chairman. “The Human Rights Association leader is targeted at a time when parliamentary committees is exposing torture in police stations and prisons.

“Relatives of the disappeared are targeted even as people continue to disappear under custody. Now we are faced with attacks justified on racial discrimination. We observe that everything fits the pattern of a preconceived plan, designed to instigate civil strife in order to end talk of a political solution to the Kurdish Question.”

Meanwhile the attack goes on. Turkish army chief of staff, general Ismail Hakki Karadayi, was last week claiming to have already crushed 95 percent of the PKK’s armed presence on Turkish territory. The army estimates that 2,300 PKK forces operated in Turkey, with another 2,400 over the border in Northern Iraq, before Operation Murat began.

“The military claims that the PKK is finished is highly exaggerated,” says Umit Firat, an independent Kurdish analyst in Istanbul. “This is guerrilla war and guerrillas are not expected to defeat the army but prolong the combat.

“The army has inflicted heavy blows on the PKK, but they are still there, and none of the Kurdish demands have been met. There is still a long way to go to finish matters, if such a finish is possible,” he says. “The ongoing army operation is rather more aimed at spreading propaganda than actual combat. This is a sort of psychological warfare operation.”

One of 19 sons of the Sakik family, Semdin Sakik has already lost two of his brothers, also PKK guerrillas, killed in the war. Another brother, Sirri, became a Turkish MP in 1991 as a member of the pro-Kurdish Democracy Party. The party was banned in 1994.

Sakik publicly split with PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan this year, who put him on televised trial shortly before the Turks snatched him. “You are not living anymore,” Ocalan told Sakik during the broadcast hearings. “You are right, my leader,” Sakik replied.

He managed to escape from PKK custody in Syria and fled to Northern Iraq, to an area controlled by Iraqi Kurdish rebel leader Mesoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) forces. The KDP granted refugee status to Sakik and officially refused to hand him over to the Turkish army.

However, Sakik, in spite of KDP warnings, moved from the relative safety of the Iraqi countryside to the northern Iraqi border town of Dohuk, where he was caught — or as some speculate, agreed to be ‘rescued’ by the Turkish special forces.

PKK leader Ocalan has no doubt. He told Kurdish satellite Med-TV last week that Sakik had betrayed the Kurds, “deliberately giving himself to the Turkish army and guiding the operation against his own people.”

“Sakik might have turned informer but the causes of the conflict remain,” says Firat. “Without political will to forge a solution, there is no way out.”