Bit by bit, ugly facts come out

MESUT YILMAZ is learning that hints are no substitute for the full story. The Turkish prime minister had asked to be given a report on the delicate relationship between corruption and the handling of the 14-year-old war against Kurdish guerrillas in the south-east of the country. The civil servant given the job, Kutlu Savas, duly turned in the report. But on January 22nd the prime minister, appearing on television, revealed only a few bits of it, to do with policemen, intelligence agents and criminals. Prodded by journalists, he released some more nuggets on the 26th. The trouble is, he can hardly stop there. Mr Savas has discovered matters too explosive to remain official secrets.

His most damaging statement is that “an execution squad was set up within the state.” He does not say what many suspect, that this squad was responsible for the deaths of many of the Kurds—anything from 2,500 to 5,000—who were mysteriously killed between 1990 and 1996. But he does say that members of the secret service (the National Intelligence Organisation, known as MIT), the police and the military police's intelligence wing, JITEM, were all involved, sometimes warring among themselves, and that all three used the same hit-man. Among those killed in the crossfire, contends Mr Savas, were Turkey's biggest casino-owner, 15 secret-service informants and the army major who founded JITEM.

Not all of this is news. Since 1996, when a senior policeman and a wanted killer died together in the crash of a car belonging to a Kurdish member of parliament, enterprising editors have been publishing accounts of collaboration between security men and criminals. Now Mr Savas notes that some policemen “entered the service of drug dealers”. So Turks are wondering whether the security men were competing for cash from the heroin trade between Turkey and Europe. They also want to know who ordered the Kurdish killings. One opposition member of parliament says “the army link is missing.”

The suspicious finger may not stop there. Mr Savas's report concentrates on the years 1993-95, when Tansu Ciller was prime minister. Mrs Ciller, now in opposition, is Mr Yilmaz's sworn enemy. To make things grimmer, Mr Savas drops hints about pals she appointed to run public banks. Mr Yilmaz has already ordered further judicial inquiries. Mrs Ciller's husband has been charged with tax-dodging.

EPA

Agar aghast at the accusations

When Mrs Ciller became prime minister, the Kurdish guerrillas were getting generous financial help from most of Turkey's heroin dealers. Mrs Ciller's answer was to appoint Mehmet Agar—a police chief she later made interior minister—to direct a special police team whose members included wanted criminals, one of whom was killed in the 1996 car crash. Within two years, most of the guerrillas' big benefactors were dead. Mr Agar and the Kurdish MP, Sedat Bucak, are both standing trial, separately, on an array of charges mostly to do with corruption.

But the smuggling went on, so who then took their places? Neither Mr Savas nor his boss seems in a hurry to answer. One reason may be that the skulduggery began well before Mrs Ciller came to power. Mr Agar, for example, got his first big police job under Turgut Ozal, the country's leader for most of the 1980s. When Ozal opened up Turkey's economy, rich criminals were offered legal loopholes and financial incentives to bring ill-gotten dollars home. Many extra-judicial killings were committed while Mr Yilmaz was first Ozal's foreign minister and then prime minister, when Mrs Ciller was a mere economics professor.

Mr Agar presumably knows the answers to many interesting questions. Friends say he had to mete out rough justice in order to contain both crime and Kurdish separatists. He may talk. So may the owner of the car that revealingly crashed in 1996—whose clansmen, Mr Savas notes, “were into smuggling drugs and guns”. Sending them to jail could reassure restive Turks. It may also persuade the generals to come up with a better security system. If so, Mr Savas will have done well.