MONDAY NIGHT was supposed to be a time of celebration for the inhabitants of Bilge, a Kurdish village set in a fold of hills above Mardin, in southeastern Turkey. Relatives had gathered to hear the former village chief Cemil Celebi give his consent to his 20-year-old daughter Sevgi’s marriage to a cousin, Habip Ari. There was supposed to be dancing, laughter, and prayers for the future of the young couple.
Then, just after 9pm, as men and women filed into separate rooms in Celebi’s house for evening prayers, the shooting started. Four or five men, their faces hidden in masks, forced their way into the house and opened fire with machine guns.
Within minutes, 44 people were dead, victims of an unprecedented massacre that has shocked Turkey to the core.
“The village imam was at the head of the room, a young man from Ankara, and the village men were lined up behind him on their prayer mats,” one villager told Turkish reporters. “They were mown down in rows.”
A 20-year-old woman who survived by hiding under a bed described a very similar scene in the women’s room. “They broke into the house and started spraying the place with bullets,” she told investigators.
When they had finished, they cold-bloodedly began inspecting the bodies to make sure everybody was dead.
The shooting lasted no more than 10 minutes, according to an eyewitness who missed the engagement party because her husband fell asleep at home. For the Celebi family, it was a holocaust: 21 dead, including the bride-to-be and her father. With the exception of the woman hiding under the bed, only one small girl survived unharmed, hidden under the bodies of her murdered relatives.
Hearing gunshots, Bilge men – like all villagers, members of a state-backed militia armed to fight against Kurdish separatists – had rushed from their positions on the outskirts of the village and opened fire on the assailants. They came too late. A sandstorm had reduced visibility to 10m, covering the gunmen as they fled.
Arrested early on Tuesday with their weapons, the suspected assailants turned out to be cousins of the Celebis and Aris, and inhabitants of Bilge, interior ministry sources said.
Clearly relieved this was not the work of Kurdish separatists, whose murder of 10 Turkish soldiers last Wednesday has left fragile hopes of peace in tatters, the media followed Turkish officials in linking the killings to the die-hard tribal customs of some parts of the Kurdish southeast.
At least one person had died in the early 1990s when a blood feud erupted between the family of the groom-to-be and the assailants’ family, television presenters said, quoting local sources. The feud had eventually been patched up. But locals said Cemil Celebi’s decision to marry his daughter off to a rival branch of the family after turning down the suit of one of the assailants’ close relatives had stoked up old enmities.
Yet many analysts are unconvinced by efforts to explain the Bilge bloodbath – by far the biggest massacre of its kind in modern Turkish history – with talk about traditional practices.
Blood feud killings rarely result in the deaths of more than three or four people, let alone 44, they point out. Above all, while tribes have no qualms about killing women deemed to have sullied the honour of the family, the mass-murder of women and children is in complete violation of standard tribal law.
“It is too early to be sure, but I think we are faced here with something completely new,” says Mazhar Bagli, a sociologist from the nearby city of Diyarbakir who travelled to Bilge today. For Bagli, the annihilation of the Celebi and Ari families shows how traditional structures have been dangerously unbalanced by a separatist war that has killed more than 45,000 people since 1984. The background to tensions between the Bilge families backs him up. Trouble began at the height of the war, when Ankara was drafting thousands of Kurds into militias armed to fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.
One branch of the family joined up eagerly, not so much out of a sense of loyalty as in the knowledge that guns, ammunition and state backing would give it the upper hand over its rivals. Much more unwilling to be in the front line of a conflict with militants who had a history of massacring militia families, the other branch took up guns shortly afterwards, so as not to be left behind.
For a decade or more, the two families, armed to the teeth, put on a show of unity, going out together on operations against the PKK. When unhappiness about Cemil Celebi’s choice of a groom for his daughter relit old enmities, one side had the ammunition to make a thorough job of their revenge.
“If you give men guns and protection, before long they’ll start using them for their own ends,” says Celal Baslangic, a journalist who has written widely on the Turkish conflict.
As early as 1995, a Turkish parliamentary report described the militia system as an “investment in social discord” and confirmed militia involvement in extortion, theft of property and village evictions.
Like their counterparts in the PKK and colleagues in state paramilitary groups, a minority of militia chiefs are believed to have played a role in the multibillion-pound heroin trade that flourished in the region during the conflict.
Yet, while locals see the militia system as one of the biggest obstacles to peace in the region, the Turkish government still looks on it as a means of fighting massive local unemployment. Five years ago, there were 70,000 Kurdish militiamen. Since then, up to 27,000 newcomers have joined the ranks.
Talking on the private TV channel NTV today, sociologist Rustem Erkan said the Bilge massacre left the whole of Turkey “with blood on its hands”. For Bagli, Turkey’s government must respond to Monday’s bloodbath with an immediate investigation into a system that permits men armed with nothing more than primary school certificates and an oath of loyalty to tout kalashnikovs at will.
Back in Bilge on Tuesday, most survivors were too shocked to mouth more than a couple of sentences for reporters massed on the village perimeter.
Apart from the wind, the only sound was the chug of four diggers excavating mass graves for the dead, and – from a field behind the graveyard – the high-pitched Kurdish dirges of the women.
The men, meanwhile, were down in Mardin, waiting for relatives’ bodies to be released from the hospital morgue. When they come back, Cemil Celebi’s backyard, still decorated for a wedding, will be put to use for a wake.