TURKEY:Turkey's military stands accused of waging psychological war against Kurdish villagers, writes Nicholas Birchin Sirimli, eastern Anatolia
ELDERLY VILLAGERS have gone to Turkey's highest court to change the name of a local barracks named after a general who executed their relatives without trial, in a case that highlights the ongoing authoritarian mentality of Turkey's military.
It has been 65 years since Mehmet Ozkaplan's 17-year-old brother was shot alongside 32 other villagers on trumped-up charges of smuggling and espionage, and the bitterness had begun to fade.
Until 2004, that is, when the military base 10 miles down the road was renamed after General Mustafa Muglali. "Not even an infidel would do this," Ozkaplan (80), says, sitting in the single shop in Sirimli, a Kurdish village on the Turkish-Iranian border. "They burned my guts."
For him, his brother is a martyr. On Fridays, he says, a light comes down from the sky onto the lonely valley north of the village where the men, their hands bound, were lined up in July 1943 and mown down by machine gun fire.
Tried for ordering what has become one of the most notorious massacres in Turkish history, Mustafa Muglali was sentenced to death in 1950 and died in jail a year later, his sentence commuted to 20 years' imprisonment.
Yet, efforts to remove his name from the Ozalp barracks have proved difficult. Last month, a court in Ankara said it was not competent to rule on military matters, and threw the case out. The matter is now before the High Court. "The ruling surprised us, but not nearly as much as the arguments the Ministry of Defence used in court," says Dincel Arslan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, in his office in the eastern city of Van.
"Mustafa Muglali served his sentence for the crime he committed," the defence reads. "Claiming that the deceased man's sentence should be continued indefinitely runs counter to all legal and democratic values."
Ministry lawyers also argued that renaming the barracks after Muglali was in line with army directives requiring military facilities to be named after "commanders who have served successfully, or are remembered, in the region".
"It is as though killing 33 innocents was an act of heroism," says Mehmet Ozkaplan.
For some, it was. Muglali "was imprisoned for doing his duty", retired general Necati Ozgen said during a televised debate shortly after the barracks was renamed.
In 1997, a bust of Muglali was erected in the War Academy in Ankara, in a move equivalent to the restoration of full military honours.
Author Ali Murat Irat says names have always been imbued with ideological significance in Turkey. During the current conservative prime minister's time as mayor of Istanbul, he points out, the city's largest Alevi neighbourhood was renamed after an Ottoman Sultan, famed for his 16th century pogroms against this heterodox Muslim sect. "This Ozalp case is worse, though," he says. "It's the work of a mentality that does not want stability in the region. It's a mentality that says 'Look at me, I'm here.'"
In the mainly Kurdish southeast, many see it as a straightforward act of psychological warfare, coming at a time when a war which Kurdish insurgents had waged against the Turkish state since 1984 had all but petered out.
Following revelations late last week in the Turkish press of a military-backed plan to weaken the government, such claims do not seem entirely far-fetched.
According to documents published by the daily Taraf on June 21st, the main aim of the 2007 "Urgent Action Plan" was to coerce the media and judiciary into co-operating in the fight against Turkey's government.
But the plan also called for "activities that will 'upset' people [in southeastern Turkey] and give the message that they will continue to be upset as long as they support terrorism".
A liberal columnist for the pro-government daily Yeni Safak, Ali Bayramoglu, sees parallels between Ozalp and the action plan. "The Turkish state has evolved out of seeing the Kurdish problem as purely a terrorist problem, but its habit of imposing itself through violence goes back a long way," he says. "Naming the barracks after Muglali is an act of defiance, nothing else, a way of showing who is in charge down there." Author of a book on what Turks call 'The Affair of the 33 Bullets', Nese Ozgen, thinks Muglali's significance extends well beyond the Kurdish issue.
The fates of 37 Kurdish villagers shot in almost identical circumstances a month before the Ozalp killings have been forgotten, she points out. "When opposition MPs began pushing for an investigation into what he had done, it was because they saw votes in it," Ozgen says. "Justice for the villagers had no part in the equation, and hasn't had since. From the start, they were symbols in somebody else's political game."