Even Human Rights Watch makes clear that the murders they mention were not just those "for which the PKK took responsibility" but include those "attributed to the PKK" (@ <http://www.hrw.org/press98/nov/italy-apendix.htm>). Which is which? And attributed by whom? The Turkish government?
For the sake of argument, though, let's take the figures given by HRW at their face value (we will not inquire whether the individuals killed by the PKK or the Turkish government were "innocent" by either's standards, that is, whether they had themselves undertaken any political killings before their deaths). HRW attributes 65 killings to the PKK in 1994 @ <http://www.hrw.org/press98/nov/italy-apendix.htm>. What of the Turkish government's behavior in the same year? "In 1994 alone, more than a hundred people, mainly Kurdish villagers, 'disappeared' after being taken into custody by gendarmes or police," according to HRW @ <http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/turkey/kurd.htm>. That's just counting the Kurds disappeared by the police, not those killed by soldiers, "village guards," etc.
Kevin McKiernan reported in 1999 that:
***** The war in Turkey represents the single largest use of U.S. weapons anywhere in the world by non-U.S. forces, according to Bill Hartung of the World Policy Institute. "I can think of no instance since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982," he said, "where American weaponry has been put to this concentrated a use." In 15 years of fighting in Turkey nearly 40,000 lives have been lost, more than in the conflicts on the West Bank and in Northern Ireland combined. The two million refugees produced by the war in Kurdistan are roughly the number of homeless created by the widely reported war in Bosnia, where U.S. weapons were not a factor. In contrast, 75 percent of the Turkish arsenal was made in the United States, according to estimates.
<http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1999/ma99/ma99mckiernan.html> *****
HRW claims that "Human Rights Watch recounted that between 1992 and 1995, the height of the conflict, Ocalan's PKK is believed to have been responsible for at least 768 extrajudicial executions, mostly of civil servants and teachers, political opponents, off-duty police officers and soldiers, and those deemed by the PKK to be "state supporters." In addition, the PKK committed numerous large-scale massacres of civilians, usually against villagers or villages that somehow were connected with the state civil defense 'village guard system'" @ <http://www.hrw.org/press98/nov/italy-apendix.htm>; add the figures in the "[l]ist of massacres attributed to the PKK or for which the PKK took responsibility" on the same page to 768, and you'll get 1127. 1127 x 3.7 = 4167. (That's an overestimate, as the years 1992-1995 were "the height of the conflict," but let's set that aside.)
Even accepting what HRW attributes to the PKK entirely and extrapolating from it into an inflated estimate (as I did above), clearly, it is the Turkish government that is responsible for the majority of 30,000-40,000 deaths, more than 3,000 villages burned, and 2 million refugees. So, let me ask again. What made HRW refuse to call for indictments of any Turkish political leader, any other Kurdish leader of any other faction, or any US president, while calling for prosecution of Ocalan by the Italian government, rather than demanding that Italy give him asylum (as Italian center-left politicians argued)? Why is Iraq part of the "axis of evil" and Turkey a member of NATO? Is the Turkish government not "a mass murderer"? Is the US government not "a mass murderer" also? Why are Kurds in Iraq "good" -- "freedom fighters" -- and those in Turkey "bad" -- "terrorists"?
-- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>