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=> Qordish Villages(NYT)

Posted by Osman Sesli (Guest) - Saturday, October 25 2003, 22:51:13 (EDT)
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NYT: Kurds claim Turkish troops destroyed 4,000 villages

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ANKARA - An influential American newspaper covered the issue of destroyed Kurdish villages in Southeastern Anatolia during the war against the seperatist terror organization Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the early 1990s.

"Human rights groups say Turkish security forces destroyed as many as 4,000 villages and hamlets and displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds," wrote the New York Times.

According to the newspaper, Kurdish villagers broke the silence that has prevailed in this country over what human rights groups here say was one of the most violent secrets of the 1990's: the systematic campaign by Turkish security forces to burn down villages of Kurds suspected of harboring separatist terrorists.

"But until last week, according to Kurdish lawyers, the scorched-earth practices of the Turkish government were too sensitive a topic to speak about in Turkey itself. Claiming that Turkish forces had burned a Kurdish village, they said, was often tantamount to a death sentence," claimed the New York Times.

Kurdish people who filed claims for their burned homes often disappeared, said Selahattin Demirtas, the chairman of the Human Rights Association of Diyarbakir, as did, sometimes, the lawyers themselves.

Nusret Miroglu, the governor of Diyarbakir, denied the accusations. "The Turkish army does not burn villages -- this is a lie," he said "We are a country of laws."

"It is quite possible," Governor Miroglu continued, "that the terrorists burned this village." He was referring to Kurdish rebels.

Since last year, the Turkish Parliament has passed laws allowing Kurdish parents to give their children Kurdish names, Kurdish teachers to hold classes on the Kurdish language, and Kurdish broadcasters to set up their own television station. Earlier this year, the government lifted emergency rule in the areas where it remained in the southeastern part of the country.

The changing relationship between the Turkish government and its Kurdish subjects was evident in the very fact that the court hearings took place last week. "What you saw today could never have happened four years ago," Meral Bestas, a Kurdish lawyer, said after last week's court hearing. "People were too afraid."

But the new Turkish policy extends only so far. Despite the testimony of 20 villagers, each of whom told much the same story, the judge in the case, Mithat Ozcakmaktasi, ruled that more time was needed for a verdict.

According to the newspaper, the story, as recounted by the villagers, began on March 6, 1993. The troops of the Uzman Jandarma, a paramilitary force active in the region, entered Derecik at around midday and told the occupants of about half of the village to leave their homes immediately. Once the villagers had filed out, the troops began pouring what some villagers described as a flammable powder, perhaps phosphorous, onto the wooden roofs and furniture inside.

"By many accounts here, burning villages was part of a Turkish strategy to deprive the terrorists of sanctuary. Two years ago, a Turkish parliamentary commission concluded that more than 3,000 villages had been destroyed and some 378,000 people displaced. But the commission reached no conclusions about who had set the villages afire. It is still not easy to uncover the details of what happened in Derecik, situated 50 miles north of Diyarbakir, as it remains closed to outsiders... Along the way, wreckage abounded from the war that once raged. On the roadside, some 30 miles outside Diyarbakir, stood the remains of what had once been a small village: piles of old bricks, charred wood and a few pieces of rusty furniture," wrote the newspaper.

The suit, taken up by the president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association and three other lawyers, led to countercharges from prosecutors that the lawyers had made up the story. The prosecutors charged each of them with abusing their legal responsibilities, a felony under Turkish law. Sezgin Tanrikulu, the president of the bar association, said he was not surprised.

Turkish Daily News

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