Sedat Peker has, on his YouTube channel over the past three weeks, been accusing the leading politicians and various other names close to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of having murky links with the underworld, of being involved in drug trafficking and even assassinations.
Whilst his allegations brought up one more time the debates of ‘unsolved murders’ and the state-linked crimes perpetrated against political figures, journalists and Kurdish politicians during the 1990s, Abdullah Öcalan’s former evaluations on Turkey’s political-mafia nexus have recently begun to be echoed by Kurdish political commentators and politicians.
Abdullah Öcalan shared his views on the ‘counter-guerilla-state’ structure in Turkey on 17 November 1996 via a phone call during a television programme on Med TV.
“There is a history”, he noted, “of taking Turkey completely under under its influence, deeply affecting, pulling apart and putting all the economy, the social structure and all political structures at the disposal of war. If you do not correctly evaluate this history, how would you make politics? A part of the state gets incredibly rich. The secret part, the ‘counter-guerrilla’ part, the part owned by the mobs. This is the essence of the current conflict”.
He warned the intellectuals and peoples of Turkey about the ‘mobs’ organised within the state as he underlined the perpetuity of the counter-guerrilla and the mob structures within the Turkish state, regardless of the elections and changing governments:
“I would like to tell the people and responsible intellectuals of Turkey that the actual reason for all your poverty is this structure. As long as this organisation of mobs, which swallows the state, society and even the capital, maintain their existence, nobody will prosper.
“Many fascist leaders were brought down. But if you ask why these mobs are not brought down, let me tell you. They conduct relentless torture. All stations led by gang leaders and ‘Special Teams’ have turned into notorious torture chambers. Almost in every street corner, there is a murder being committed. People are being killed. They want to terrorise society.”
He also drew attention to the inter-relationship between the war against the Kurds, the organisation of the counter-guerrilla structures within the state and the decadence of the society:
“It is true that the Turkish public is aware of the counter-guerrilla. And they consider these to be put forward against the PKK as ‘patriotism’. And this society is in desperate need of a loaf of bread at this moment. This is all this policy can give to Turkish society. Now, we have arrived to such a point that they have seen what the war they supported has cost them.
“This merciless, notorious massacre formented war against the Kurdish people is not an ordinary experience. Turkish society has experienced the dirtiest decadence in its history [during this war]. But now, things have come to such a level that these mobs they once supported dry up their Adam’s wine. Now, if the Turkish people and Turkish intellectuals and the leftists have the courage, they need to take urgent steps within this regard. Because the war continues with all its violence. You cannot simply swipe such dirt off the ground. They need to take more serious steps.”
