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Ending Impunity for Killings and Disappearances in 1990S Turkey WATCH HUMAN RIGHTS Time for Justice Ending Impunity for Killings and Disappearances in 1990s Turkey WATCH Time for Justice Ending Impunity for Killings and Disappearances in 1990s Turkey Copyright © 2012 Human Rights Watch All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 1-56432-934-8 Cover design by Rafael Jimenez Human Rights Watch is dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world. We stand with victims and activists to prevent discrimination, to uphold political freedom, to protect people from inhumane conduct in wartime, and to bring offenders to justice. We investigate and expose human rights violations and hold abusers accountable. We challenge governments and those who hold power to end abusive practices and respect international human rights law. We enlist the public and the international community to support the cause of human rights for all. Human Rights Watch is an international organization with staff in more than 40 countries, and offices in Amsterdam, Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Goma, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Nairobi, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto, Tunis, Washington DC, and Zurich. For more information, please visit our website: http://www.hrw.org SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 1-56432-934-8 Time for Justice Ending Impunity for Killings and Disappearances in 1990s Turkey Summary ............................................................................................................................. 1 Key Recommendations ....................................................................................................... 6 Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 7 I. Building Momentum for Justice ........................................................................................ 8 Early Efforts at Accountability .................................................................................................. 8 The Ergenekon Case .............................................................................................................. 12 Growing Openness to Accountability? ..................................................................................... 15 Parliamentary Support ........................................................................................................... 16 Pressure for Accountability from Relatives of the Dead and Missing ........................................ 18 II. The Temizöz Trial ........................................................................................................... 21 A Climate of Fear ................................................................................................................... 25 III. Obstacles to Justice: Lessons from the Temizöz Trial ................................................... 30 Limited Scope of Investigation ............................................................................................... 30 Non-application of Witness Protection ................................................................................... 32 Witnesses Retracting their Statements ................................................................................... 36 Attempts to Direct and Intimidate Witnesses .......................................................................... 38 Threats to Lawyers ................................................................................................................ 40 Length of Proceedings ........................................................................................................... 40 A Social Obstacle to Justice: the Village Guard System ........................................................... 42 IV. Statute of Limitations: Limiting Wider Accountability? ................................................. 45 V. Thousands More Cases to Investigate ............................................................................ 55 VI. Recommendations ........................................................................................................ 61 To the government of Turkey .................................................................................................. 61 To the European Union and its member states, and the United States government .................. 63 To the Council of Europe ........................................................................................................ 64 Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 65 Summary Turkey’s modern history has been marked by impunity for serious human rights abuses highlighted by the state’s systematic failure to hold to account members of the security forces and other public officials for serious violations in the decades following the September 1980 military coup. In the 1990s, during the armed conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), government military and security forces compelled hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their villages, and carried out enforced disappearances and killings of thousands of civilians. Affected were mainly Kurds in Turkey’s southeastern and eastern provinces. The PKK also committed grave human rights abuses in the course of the conflict. According to official estimates, by 2008 the armed struggle between the military and the PKK had resulted in an estimated 44,000 deaths of military personnel, PKK members, and civilians. Despite two parliamentary inquiries in the 1990s into the state’s collusion in political assassinations and involvement in lawless activities, no-one in the Turkish state was held accountable during this period for the pattern of gross human rights violations committed by the military and security services. A handful of prosecutions in the domestic courts resulted in the conviction of low level members of the security forces and police, who received nominal, low sentences. But there was no attempt to probe higher level involvement of state officials or to examine whether the violations were a matter of state policy. There were positive indications of change in 2009, however, when a remarkable trial began in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır of a gendarmerie officer, retired colonel Cemal Temizöz, three former PKK members turned informers, and three members of the “village guard” (local paramilitary forces armed and directed by the gendarmerie). The prosecution accused the defendants of working as a criminal gang involved in the killing and disappearance of twenty people in and around the Cizre district of Şırnak province between 1993 and 1995. 1 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2012 These twenty killings were just a tiny fraction of thousands of unresolved killings and enforced disappearances that took place in the area in this period, as well as many more in other provinces of the region and in some of Turkey’s largest cities. Nonetheless after years of impunity, the investigation and prosecution of these cases marked a significant milestone. Temizöz is the most senior member of the Turkish military ever to stand trial specifically for gross violations of human rights committed in the course of the conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK. The trial, which started in September 2009, offers an opportunity to examine the obstacles to securing accountability in Turkey’s domestic courts for state-perpetrated killings and disappearances in the mainly Kurdish-populated southeast of the country in the first half of the 1990s. In January 2012, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe described the trial as “a unique opportunity to shed light on a period of systematic human rights abuses in south-east Turkey, which feature prominently in the case-law of the ECtHR [European Court of Human Rights].” This report examines some of the lessons the Temizöz trial provides about the current obstacles to effective investigation and prosecution of past abuses and highlights some of the reforms required to allow the effective criminal investigation of the hundreds and possibly thousands of similar cases. The report recommends further steps the Turkish government needs to take to combat impunity in Turkey. Lessons of the Temizöz Trial The Temizöz trial highlights obstacles to securing justice for victims of human rights abuses in the region in seven key areas: • Limited scope of investigation: The prosecutor failed to explore possible chain of command involvement in the killings beyond Cemal Temizöz, for example by investigating the command responsibility for the alleged crimes among the higher ranking officers in the region. • Non application of witness protection: While Turkish courts have widely used orders to conceal the identity of witnesses in organized crime and terrorism trials, there has so far been little application of the Witness Protection Law in trials relating to crimes committed by the security forces. Application of the Witness TIME FOR JUSTICE 2 Protection Law in the Temizöz trial could have significantly increased the willingness of vulnerable witnesses to participate. • Witnesses retracting their statements: The Temizöz trial has demonstrated how witnesses called to testify because of their “insider” knowledge are liable to retract the initial witness statements they made before prosecutors when they appear before the court. Such witnesses include village guards, former PKK members turned informer, or military
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