Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000 - Turkey

Combating terrorism remained a top Turkish domestic and foreign policy priority as ethnic, Islamist, leftist, and transnational terrorist groups continued to threaten Turkey. In 2000, previous Turkish successes in fighting these groups were consolidated, producing a dramatically lowered incidence of terrorist activity. The Turkish Government remained in the forefront of cooperative international counterterrorism efforts and worked closely with Washington on combating groups that target US personnel and facilities.

At the direction of its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which long had sought to achieve an independent Kurdish state through violence, asserted that it now seeks, through a political campaign, only guarantees of Kurdish political, economic, social, and cultural rights in a democratic Turkey. The government did not respond to the PKK's declared change in tactics and goals. Prime Minister Ecevit warned that his government would reconsider its decision not to press for the death sentence against Ocalan if the PKK renewed its violence while the European Court of Human Rights reviewed his trial. The Court took up Ocalan's appeal in November.

Meanwhile, the number of violent clashes between PKK and government forces in Turkey declined significantly with 45 confrontations in the first 11 months of 2000, according to the Turkish General Staff, compared with thousands in previous years. Turkish forces mounted vigorous operations against the few hundred PKK guerrillas in southeastern Turkey and the several thousand who had withdrawn to northern Iraq, enlisting the aid of Iraqi Kurdish groups that have fought sporadically with the PKK over the last several years. Turkish officials and newspapers noted that Syria observed its commitment made in 1998 to abjure support to the PKK. In contrast, Iran allegedly continued to provide at least a safehaven to armed PKK militants.

Turkish security forces continued their effective campaign against the extreme-left terrorist group Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C, formerly Dev Sol). The group was able to mount only a few attacks. In August, the police arrested seven suspected DHKP/C terrorists that allegedly planned to attack the airbase at Incirlik, from which a joint US-British-Turkish force maintains "Operation Northern Watch" over the no-fly zone in Iraq. Several European countries, including Belgium, have declined Turkish requests to extradite PKK, DHKP/C, and other terrorists, citing Turkey's retention of the death penalty and the political motivation of the suspects' crimes.

The DHKP/C, joined by small extreme leftist factions, staged repeated violent uprisings in prisons to protest the government's efforts to transfer prisoners from overcrowded older prisons – in which terrorist and criminal groups effectively controlled entire wards – to newer prisons with cells for two or three prisoners. In December, the outlawed terrorist group Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist showed its opposition to the transfer program by killing two policemen. "Operation Return to Life," undertaken in December by security forces to gain control of the prison wards, left about 30 prisoners dead, some by their own hand.

The police and the judiciary dealt heavy blows to domestic Islamist terrorist groups in 2000, including the Turkish Hizballah, a domestic terrorist group of mostly Kurdish Sunni Islamists with no known ties to Lebanese Hizballah. Turkish officials and media assert that Turkish Hizballah has received limited Iranian support. Turkish Hizballah's adherents are anti-Western but primarily target Kurds who are viewed as insufficiently Islamic or unwilling to meet the group's extortion demands. They have not targeted US citizens. Through October, 723 police operations, mostly in predominantly Kurdish southeastern Turkey, netted more than 2,700 Turkish Hizballah suspects, approximately 1,700 of whom were arrested. The trial of 15 Turkish Hizballah suspects accused of 156 murders began in July in Diyarbakir.

Turkish authorities arrested members of the Jerusalem Warriors, a small ethnic Turkish Sunni Islamist group with tenuous links to the Turkish Hizballah. Turkish officials and media reported that they had received direction, training, and support from Iran. In August, 17 Warriors went on trial for involvement in 22 murders, including assassinations of several prominent Turkish secularist intellectuals. Four have been accused of killing USAF Sgt. Victor Marvick in a car-bombing in 1991.

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