Turk statebacked mobsters kill, trade drugs

By Suna Erdem

ISTANBUL, Turkey (Reuter) A Turkish parliament draft report on
stateunderworld ties painted a bleak picture of rightwing gangsters using
state privileges to kill and trade guns and drugs while their friends in
parliament were made ministers.

But the draft report, obtained by Reuters Wednesday, stopped short of
pointing a finger at any of the starstudded list of suspects attacked by the
local media after a crash in which a top policeman and wanted gangster died
in the same car.

``Some unofficial groups have come to operate the workings of the state
and the state organization has degenerated,'' the report said. ``These people
have even come to influence the congresses of political parties in Turkey.''

``People mentioned in state security reports as having links with the
mafia have been promoted to the most important positions. These people have
even been made ministers,'' the report said, but mentioned no names.

The draft report, whose details will be finalized late Wednesday by an
allparty commission, also purported to throw light on the numerous unsolved
murders in southeast Turkey.

It quotes a man called Huseyin Oguz, whose position it does not identify,
as saying, ``In the evening the intelligence services would bring us a list
and in the morning the hitmen would go and kill (those on) the lists.''

A government member of parliament (MP), Sedat Bucak, who heads a tribal
militia fighting separatist Kurdish guerrillas in the southeast, was in the
same car as the policeman and the gangster when it crashed in the town of
Susurluk in November.

The commission will consider a demand by a top prosecutor to lift the
parliamentary immunities of Bucak and Mehmet Agar, who resigned as interior
minister after the crash, so they can be tried for abuse of position and
harboring wanted men.

Agar's resignation and an unprecedented public outcry raised hopes of a
thorough inquiry into alleged stategangland links.

But only 10 people, mostly lowranking policemen, have been charged by an
Istanbul court investigating the crash, and the commission draft report only
implicated a handful of people including one of the 10 charged and two
people who are dead.

The commission, mostly government MPs, voted against questioning Foreign
Minister Tansu Ciller and a top general.

The report says rightwing mobsters were used in the 1980s for state
operations at home and abroad, given gun licenses and special passports
normally used by top level civil servants.

These mobsters later began to use the privileges for their own work,
including the drug trade, gunrunning, moneylaundering, armed robbery,
extortion, corruption in state auctions, mediating between bureaucrats and
the prostitution and gambling sectors and bribery. State workers turned a
blind eye or helped them, the report said.

In the 1990s, organized crime spread to the southeast, taking advantage
of a state of emergency and a system of statepaid village guards set up to
help the army in its 12year fight against the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party.

The report said many state officials have hidden their activities as
``state secrets.''

The report's recommendations include sweeping legal reform, limiting MPs'
immunity from prosecution, reforming laws that restrict legal action against
state employees, abolishing or reforming the village guard system and finding
an alternative to emergency rule in the southeast.

It also calls for a review of methods used to fight the guerrillas in
order to prevent criminal gain from the insurgency.

Parliament, however, is not bound by the commission's recommendations.