Ergenekon Investigation Needs to Look at Kurdish Murders

Levent Ersöz was allowed to grow in the Kurdish region, and he committed crimes there. His signature is underneath all killings without known assailants, all rights violations, as well as villages burnt down and destroyed. Thus Sırrı Sakık, MP for the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in Muş, eastern Turkey, evaluates the role of Ersöz, former intelligence officer of the clandestine gendarmerie organisation JITEM.

Ersöz was to be arrested last year, but managed to escape to Russia. He was finally arrested last week, having returned to Turkey to undergo medical treatment.

Two of many disappearances

Sakık continues, “The most important question that Ersöz needs to be asked is undoubtedly about the disappearance of Serdar Tanış, Silopi district chair of the HADEP party [the DTP’s predecessor], and his assistant Ebubekir Deniz when in gendarmerie custody.”

On 25 January 2001, the two men were called to the Silopi Gendarmerie station. They were never heard of again. Relatives of the disappeared men appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, and Turkey was sentenced to paying 170,000 Euros in damages for not conducting an effective investigation.

Susurluk actors need to be investigated

If, so Sakık, the illegal networks revealed by the Susurluk scandal in 1996 had been investigated properly, then the Ergenekon organisation would not have been able to thrive. He called on an investigation of politicians Tansu Çiller, Necmettin Erbakan as well as then-president Süleyman Demirel, and then-police chief Mehmet Ağar. (BÇ/AG)