Sakik's Words Echo Beyond The War Zone

[ozgurluk at xs4all.nl]

                      *** 13-May-98 ***

Title: RIGHTS-TURKEY: Sakik's Words Echo Beyond The War Zone /UPDATE/

By Nadire Mater

ISTANBUL, May 12 (IPS) - The violence spawned by the alleged
accusations of a former Kurdish guerilla leader claimed a new victim
Tuesday, when two assailants shot and wounded a leading Turkish human
rights activist in his Ankara office.

Akin Birdal, president of Turkey's independent Human Rights
Association, was reported Tuesday night to be in critical condition
with six bullet wounds in the leg, chest and shoulder.

The attack was quickly attributed to far-right nationalist gunmen
responding to the widely reported 'confessions' of Semdin Sakik, a
former top leader of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, who was grabbed
by a Turkish special forces unit in February.

Sakik's allegations, made while in the 'care' of the military fdor the
last four weeks, have been cited as the justification for a series of
attacks against the 'enemies' of the Turkish state. -- starting with
the Army's current blitz on Sakik's former f orces, the guerillas of
the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).

Allegedly backed with Sakik's information -- though the army deny it
-- forty thousand troops backed by tanks and airpower smashed into the
PKK's heartland on Apr. 24 and are still razing the area.

But Sakik did not save his words for his brother Kurds alone.  His
alleged 'confessions' also implicated almost every single prominent
critic of the military and its scorched earth policy in Turkey's
disputed south eastern provinces.

Dozens of the military's critics were fingered: Birdal and two of
Turkey's best know prisoners of conscience, pro-Kurdish party MPs
Leyla Zana and Hatip Dicle among them. All were named by Sakik,
according to the media leaks, as allegedly being 'paid age nts' of the
PKK.

Others on Sakik's list included journalists and 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 while in police custody.

The attacks began soon after his 'confessions' were leaked to the
media. 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.

Wounded Human Rights Association chairman Birdal had expressed fears
that he would be arrested following the publication of Sakik's alleged
'confession' that Birdal was a paid PKK sympathiser.

Instead two men entered Birdal's Ankara office Tuesday and opened
fire. According to reports on the privately run NTV TV network the
attack has been claimed as the work of the so-called Turkish Revenge
Brigade, a little known ultranationalist group.

Unknown assassins have already claimed the lives of dozens of
opposition journalists, rights workers and MPs in Turkey.  Generally
those targeted are reputed for their calls for a peaceful end to the
Kurdish conflict.

''It's a witch hunt,'' said Saruhan Oluc, Freedom & Solidarity Party
(ODP) deputy chairman before the shooting was reported.

''The Human Rights Association leader is targeted at a time when
parliamentary committees is exposing torture in police stations and
prisons,'' he said. ''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.''

Journalists 'named' by Sakik have faced different problems.  Among
them, 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 Ka ynak of the weekly
Aktuel has been fired, ''in compliance with the demand of the
military''.

Sakik's 'confessions' were broad. One reported confession attributes
the 1986 assassination of Swedish premier Olaf Palme to a PKK
hitman. The theory was long ago rejected by the Swedish police and the
main eyewitness, Palme's wife.

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 199 4.

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 rep lied.

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 Umit Firat, an independent Kurdish analyst in
Istanbul. ''Without political will to forge a solution, there is no
way out.'' (END/IPS/NM/RJ/98)
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