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November 25, 2005

Turkey: Life Sentences For Islamists of Turkish Hezbollah

The Turkish Press announces today that the Ankara High Criminal Court sentenced two suspects to life imprisonment on Thursday (yesterday).

The two were members of Turkish Hezbollah (not the Syrian Hezbollah) who were accused of attempting to spoil the constitutional order in Turkey by force. Another member of the group was given a nine-year sentence and two others a seven-year jail term, for being members of an illegal organisation.

Six more suspects were acquitted because of a lack of evidence.

So what is Turkish Hezbollah? Unlike the more familiar and Shia Muslim Hezbollah, which operates in Syria and Lebanon, and is financed by Iran, the Turkish Hezbollah is Sunni. Its aims are to create an Islamic state in Turkey, and to institute Sharia law.

Background essays on Turkish Hezbollah can be found by Evan Kohlmann from Nov 25 2003, and from MIPT Terrorism Knowledgebase. A contradictory account, which claims much of Hezbollah's activity is used to oppress Kurds, can be found here from 2000.

Turkish Hezbollah, whose name means "The Party of God" appears to have been founded in southeastern Turkey in the early 1990s, and initially was allied to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group which campaigned for a separate state of Kurdistan. The groups soon parted ways. The PKK announced in 1999 that it had made a truce with the Turkish authorities. There have been claims that the Turkish government actually encouraged the early Hezbollah. Through the 1990s Hezbollah's operations were small-scale, limited to shootings and suicide attacks. The government did not really have many conflicts in the 1990s with the group, though during this period, there were 3000 "unsolved (political) murders".

The government began a crackdown on Hezbollah in 1998. In Bingol in April 1999 a suicide bomber hit the local governor's office, killing a teenage girl and injuring 12 others, and on January 17, 2000 the leader of the group, Huseyin Velioglu, was killed with two associates in a raid at a villa in Istanbul. Velioglu was a Kurd, born in Batman, a Kurdish province in Turkey.

Following Velioglu's killing, extensive raids ensued, with 900 people arrested. In the searches, bodies of several dozens of Hezbollah's victims were found. They had been kidnapped, tortured and killed, and many of these had been videotaped while they were tortured, states wsws.org. This source quotes Turkish and Kurdish reports which claim the Turkish authorities were complicit in many of the activities of Hezbollah.

On November 17, 2003, two suicide bombers attacked two large synagogues in Istanbul, killing 23 and injuring 300, and a few days later the British consulate and HSBS bank headquarters were attacked, causing 23 deaths. The synagogue attackers came from Bingol, a region with strong Hezbollah activity. The conclusion drawn from the bombings as a whole from this period, made by Abdullah Gul, foreign minister at the time, was that they were of the "same mindset of al Qaeda, they have the same concept, they are from the same school."

There is more than one Islamist group in Turkey, but it seems that Hezbollah whose aims are to de-secularise Turkey, have at some stage in their existence found common cause with elements within the Turkish system. With Erdogan now trying to further the de-secularisation of Turkey while at the same time trying to join secular Europe, the potential is that the conflicts and shows of anti-European secularism may erupt again with greater force than before.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at November 25, 2005 6:34 PM

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