In Kurdish Turkey, a New Enemy Village Guards, Empowered During War, Turn Guns on Returnees advertisement By Karl Vick Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, October 31, 2002; Page A18 UGRAK, Turkey -- The family name translates as "powerful," but by most accounts the Guclus wielded no particular clout until the state made them the law in these parts. It was intended as a purely military measure, deputizing villagers to open a new front in a long civil war against ethnic Kurdish guerrillas. But in Ugrak, which is little more than a fold of green in the rolling umber hills of southeastern Turkey, the policy had the effect of emptying the village of everyone not named Guclu. The families who left describe being pushed off their land by neighbors who used police powers to commandeer better land and bigger houses -- an allegation the Guclus deny. What no one disputes, however, is the number of people shot dead the day last month when those families returned: three, including a 7-year-old boy. In the aftermath, 10 members of the Guclu clan were arrested by the very authorities who had put them in charge. "These people given weapons by the state used the weapons for their own benefit," said Sait Tanguner, 30, who survived the fighting. "Rather than lose confiscated land, they massacred people." Turkey is facing the possibility that the United States will go to war against Iraq, but the corner of Turkey along the Iraqi border has yet to put the last war behind it. For 15 years, militants fought the Turkish security forces, demanding autonomy for the ethnic Kurdish minority. Most guerrillas laid down their arms in 1999 following the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK. Except for perhaps 300 rebels said to be hiding inside Turkey in remote mountains, the rest moved across the border to northern Iraq, where Turkish troops pursue a few thousand diehards. Tensions still fester, however, three years after the separatist war ended - - a situation that is both illustrated and sustained by the continued presence of the so-called village guards. Across southeastern Turkey, between 46,000 and 90,000 local men are still nominally on duty. Recruited, armed and paid by the state, they agreed to form the first line of defense against the guerrillas . For the government, the logic was plain. After all, who better than local residents know when the insurgents arrive in the night, demanding food and other assistance from the people they claimed to be fighting for? In divided nations from Guatemala to Rwanda, the home guard concept has been a standard counterinsurgency tactic for decades. In Turkey, the military tried to make the decision irresistible to the potential recruits. "You really didn't have a choice," said Mehmet Refiktas, 37. Asked what happened to the homes of men in his mountain village, Islamkoy, who declined the government's offer, he explained, "Oh, they were burned." More than 3,000 villages were set afire or otherwise emptied by Turkish security forces during the war, not only to punish uncooperative families but to deny the insurgents food, supplies and manpower -- another classic counterinsurgency tactic known as "draining the sea." The war displaced between 400,000 and 1 million people in parts of Kurdish-speaking Turkey, according to various estimates. Now, as they return to their former homes, many find that little has changed. Though the government has begun building new villages, like the cluster of pink two-story homes that flanked Refiktas as he shoveled dried manure onto a trailer, they remain under the sway of the village guards, whom many locals describe as mafias. Armed with state-issued G-3 assault rifles, some do as they please under the color of law, enjoying virtual immunity from prosecution, according to human rights activists and local residents. Human Rights Watch, a research and advocacy group based in New York, identified the village guard system as a major impediment to bringing displaced Kurds back to their homes. In a new report, "Displaced and Disregarded: Turkey's Failing Village Return Program," the group listed cases of guards looting timber, homes and fields, as well as attacking returning villagers, in some cases fatally. Reports of rape at the hands of village guards are rising, and critics describe leaders of prominent clans using guard status to cement their already considerable power, in some cases running smuggling rings unchallenged by state authorities afraid to try to disarm them. "The need is going down, so we are not enlisting new ones," said Gokhan Aydiner, governor for the sections of southeastern Turkey placed under "emergency rule" for the war. "But it would be so unfair that these men served and then were thrown away." In dangerous assaults on rebel strongholds, Turkish security services routinely forced village guards to lead the charge. Experts say their ranks account for a large share of the 30,000 people killed in the war. But the creation of the guards also aggravated tensions in local communities. "Because they looked at this area in purely military terms [the government] did not consider the consequences in other areas of life," said Selahattin Demirtas, chairman of the regional branch of the Human Rights Association of Turkey. "It's very dangerous for this society that it's divided between the 'patriots' and the 'traitors.' " In Ugrak, the two extended families whose men did not join the village guard said they felt compelled to move, though not all of their homes were torched. They were driven, they said, partly by the same economic pressures that drove millions into cities from a countryside that had turned into a battlefield. But their neighbors, they said, played the biggest part. "We were under big pressure from the ones who became village guards," said Sait Tanguner, complaining that the Guclus used their alliance with the government security forces known as gendarmes to intimidate the other families. In 1994, the Tanguners left for the provincial capital along with the Tekins, to whom they are related by marriage. The Guclus promptly moved into their homes and began farming their land. "Their land was just sitting there," said an exasperated Bahriye Guclu, waving a palm at acres of rich soil the color of milk chocolate. "Okay, we were living in their house," she conceded, and gestured toward a building under construction nearby. "But we're building that house. We were going to leave." When the Tanguners and Tekins returned Sept. 26, it was with the approval of the Turkish government. After producing titles to the land they would reclaim, the families were escorted to Ugrak by gendarmes. But when the uniformed men left, about 10 Guclus remained, guns raised, in a loose perimeter around the returnees, who began to unload their cars. Sait Tanguner said that when he heard the first shots, he thought they were being fired into the air to scare them. "Then we started to feel the bullets," he said. The Guclu men walked toward them, the Tanguners said, firing steadily for 10 minutes and cursing. A bullet punctured the gas tank of a parked sedan, which exploded in flames. "I was holding my son when he died," said Suleyman Tekin, 30, whose father lay dead a few paces away. "If we knew what was going to happen, we would never go back. Land is not more important than your life." Bahriye Guclu, whose husband was among the 10 eventually arrested in the case, disputed every detail of the returning family's account. "They set fire to their own car," she said. Kudbettin Arica, a relative of the Tanguners, said he and his clan merely "want to live on our land, free. I mean, the war is over, the fighting is over." He paused, and a moment later posed the question that almost every person asks foreign visitors in southeastern Turkey, where talk turns invariably to a U.S. invasion of Iraq. "Let me ask you: Will there be another war?" © 2002 The Washington Post Company
