After three decades of legal battles and relentless efforts seeking justice, the case of the murder of civil servant Mecit Baskın, allegedly by security forces, has been dropped due to the statute of limitations.
Baskın was the head of Altındağ district registry office in the Turkish capital Ankara when he was abducted and murdered in 1993. Mecit Baskın’s son Eren Baskın took to social media to announce that the statute of limitations had expired, effectively ending a 30-year legal battle. In a poignant post, Eren Baskin expressed his deep disappointment and frustration, recounting the tragic events leading up to his father’s murder and his own tireless fight for justice.
In his message posted on Saturday, Eren Baskın recalled the events of 30 September 1993, when his father Mecit was abducted and killed in the heart of Ankara, allegedly on the orders of then Chief of Police Mehmet Ağar who was later appointed Minister of the Interior. Eren Baskın stressed that he had fought a constant battle against the mindset responsible for his father’s death, in public spaces, in courtrooms and alongside the Saturday Mothers, who demonstrate weekly for justice for those who disappeared, allegedly at the hands of the state.
“I failed”, he said, underlining the significance of this case as “a struggle between good and evil, between the oppressor and the oppressed”. He added: “This account will be settled in this world, it will not be left to the Last Judgement… We will never allow the honour of humanity to be trampled on by the state unresolved…”.
The President of the Turkish Medical Association, Şebnem Korur Fincancı, voiced her support for Eren Baskin’s remarks, sharing a page on persecution from John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook, with a message saying that on reading this she had thought of his words and his long struggle.
The court case has its roots in the early 1990s, a period marked by unsolved political murders and enforced disappearances in Turkey. This case, that has fallen victim to the statute of limitations, is just one among many from those years that were not initiated until almost 20 years after the event.
The trial in Baskın’s abduction and subsequent murder was only initiated in 2013 after the confessions of a former special operations police officer, Ayhan Çarkın, who provided crucial information about the incident. Prominent state figures such as the then Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, Interior Minister Nahit Menteşe, Police Chief Mehmet Ağar, Gendarme Commander Brigadier General Veli Küçük and special forces officers İbrahim Şahin, Korkut Eken were implicated, among others.
Subsequent to this a secret organisation of the deep state whose existence was long denied officially, the Turkish Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Department (JİTEM), was accused of numerous extrajudicial and unsolved killings, disappearances and other crimes at the height of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in the 1990s, but most of these cases ended in dismissals or minimal sentences.
