2 - Paramilitaries and State Relation: Establishment of the Paramilitary Forces in the 1980s

Summary

Introduction

Four important organisations emerged in the 1980s. In 1982, the Special Police Teams were established (and reorganised in 1993); in 1985 the system of Village Guards (established in 1924) was reorganised (and again in 1991); and in the late 1980s, JİTEM was established, which included repentants. These paramilitary groups were all formed by state institutions, primarily to deal with the situation in the Kurdish provinces (northern Kurdistan). Also, during 1991–5, the extreme Islamist Hizbullah organisation that had emerged in early 1980 in a Kurdish province, Batman, was utilised by state agencies, particularly against pro-PKK Kurdish civilians and politicians. The questions addressed here concern how and why these paramilitary organisations were established and what explains their characteristics.

On the basis of secondary literature, interviews, memoirs and newspaper reports focusing on the 1990s, it appears that these paramilitary organisations were established for three main reasons: (1) the threat to the national security of the Turkish state (as perceived), (2) the weakness of the military in irregular warfare and the institutional capacity of the state, and (3) the plausible deniability they afforded regarding violence carried out against civilians. The political conditions in which these paramilitary groups emerged were those of (1) ethnic conflict (more clearly, political demands of the Kurds), (2) the army and party politics, (3) tribal politics and (4) organised crime.

I use the concept of state rather than particular regimes or governments since, as mentioned above, the role of governments in the state administration was not determinant of the ideology and politics of the Turkish state, simply because of the network of hidden relations called the ‘deep state’, and the temporary placeholders on the democratic scene did not have real power. I make a distinction between immediate causes and deeper conditions because, first, I consider the reasons why the paramilitaries were actually set up, and then I analyse the conditions of the political, military and economic environment that reveal these. Developing an assumption implicit in the first chapter, the conditions are taken to be the more important. These conditions resulted in both small-scale, informal organisations and large-scale, hierarchically ordered organisations. Some of the organisations were an extension of the secret services, others of the army and of organised crime.