Killing Revives Specter of Dark Days of Insurgency

When Gazal Beru, an impish Kurdish schoolgirl, decided to skip classes and gather beets with her playmates, she knew she was risking the wrath of her parents and teachers. What she didn’t know was that she was risking her life.

But to human rights activists who have documented a bloody 15-year insurgency in Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeast, what befell the 9-year-old in this remote mountain village three months ago was among the worst atrocities they have recorded. The grisly drama has fueled anxieties that the bitter struggle may be darkening anew.

“It was March 19, just two days before Newroz [the Kurdish New Year],” Gazal’s older sister, Meral, recalled during a recent interview here. “Just as we approached the fields, Gazal realized that she had dropped her blade, so we retraced our steps and started looking for it near the gendarmerie [paramilitary police] station.”

Meral, 13, paused and swallowed hard, her gaunt features stiffening.

“The private standing guard outside the station told us to get lost,” she continued. “When we explained what we were doing, he began to shout.”

Within seconds, Meral said, two huge dogs charged toward the sisters. She said that she tried to shield Gazal while pleading with the private to call off the dogs, but that instead of complying, he yelled “Yakala!” (“Attack!”) again. Then four more dogs joined the bloody fray.

“Gazal was hanging on to my skirt screaming and crying as we tried to run away,” said Meral, her voice shaking. “I managed to scale the wall into the neighboring cemetery. But the dogs pulled Gazal down. They ripped into my sister. They killed her. The man just watched.”

“She was the prettiest of my four girls,” rasped Gazal’s mother, Zubeyde, her dark eyes boring through the folds of a white muslin head scarf. When asked for a photograph of Gazal, she said she had none. The only picture taken of the girl was in the morgue, after her death from fatal wounds to her throat.

Rights abuses, in particular extrajudicial killings and mystery disappearances of political dissidents, have sharply declined in Turkey’s southeastern provinces since Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan called off his separatist insurgency from his island prison in September 1999.

But the unsolved slaying in January of a popular police chief in the Kurdish-dominated city of Diyarbakir, and the disappearances of two Kurdish politicians in neighboring Sirnak province the next day, revived fears of a return to “the bad old days,” according to Hanefi Isik, a prominent human rights lawyer with the Turkish Human Rights Assn.

Gazal’s story--which was carried last month on the front page of Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest-selling daily--stoked those fears.

“The difference is that people are less afraid to speak up,” Isik said in Diyarbakir.

Indeed, at the repeated urgings of the association, Gazal’s family and residents who witnessed the canine killing rampage filed a complaint with the local prosecutor’s office in the nearby township of Karliova.

Then, on May 28, Mehmet Bekaroglu, a lawmaker with the main opposition Virtue Party, formally asked the parliament to investigate Gazal’s death--although he doubts that the move will produce any results.

“Whether it is in western Turkey or in the southeast, it makes no difference,” he said in the capital, Ankara. “Members of the gendarmerie are even less likely to be prosecuted than the police.”

Locally, Gazal’s death proved no exception. The governor of Bingol province overruled prosecutors’ demands to launch an investigation despite compelling testimony against the unidentified conscript who allegedly unleashed the dogs.

Gendarmerie officials reportedly rejected the charges, telling prosecutors that the dogs were strays. The commander was among the first to console the Beru family.

But Harun Arat, a local farmer who rushed to the scene, says he immediately recognized the dogs.

“They belong to the gendarmerie,” he said.

Villager Melahat Kabak was doing laundry when she heard Meral’s cries for help.

“When I got there,” she told prosecutors in preliminary testimony, “Gazal was in a dreadful state. Her clothes were in shreds. The dogs’ heads and muzzles were covered in blood. These dogs belong to the police station.”

In further testimony, villagers complained that the dogs had maintained a “reign of terror” in Yigitler since 1994, biting at least 11 residents before killing Gazal.

Villagers have also blamed the dogs for the deaths of 150 farm animals. Some residents who threw stones at the dogs to protect themselves said gendarmerie forces threatened and beat them.

Bekaroglu said “it doesn’t really matter whom the dogs belong to--the private should have tried to save Gazal.”

Meral insists that two of the dogs that attacked her sister are now tied up on the grounds of the gendarmerie station. “I saw them when I visited Gazal’s grave,” she said.

Asked how she had the courage to return, she replied swiftly and firmly: “My sister died. I should die as well.”