ANKARA, Turkey - Huseyn Turhalli still remembers the massacre in the Kulp town of Diyarbakir in 1991: Between December 18-22 of that year Turkish soldiers opened fire on mourners trying to bury dead Kurdish guerrillas, killing seven people and causing permanent injury to two others.
“When 14 Kurdish guerillas were killed in a raid by Turkish soldiers on December 18, hundreds of people from Diyarbakir, Kulp, Lice and Silvan headed to the mountainous area to take the remains of the guerillas and bury them,” recalled Turhalli, then the head of the Diyarbakir branch of the pro-Kurdish People’s Labor Party (HEP) and a witness to the killings, and former lawyer for victims or their relatives.
More than 22 years after the massacre, a case is to be opened against some of the perpetrators by the local prosecutor in Diyarbakir.
“When the people took the remains and arrived at the bridge at Kulp on December 22, on their way back to the town center where they would bury them, they were stopped by the Turkish soldiers who said that they could not enter the village with the remains,” Turhalli recounted.
“The soldiers then opened fire, killing seven people on the bridge and injuring about 50 others,” he told Rudaw.
He remembers soldiers ordering people to lie on the ground for hours, then beating and swearing at them, breaking arms and legs in the process. “Some of the women were stripped naked and sexually abused and the possessions of men were forcibly seized by the soldiers,” Turhalli said.
“The soldiers claimed that the people shot a soldier dead. But we later proved that it was impossible and the detainees were released. But two of the detainees who were released were killed later by Ismet Yediyildiz, the then battalion commander of Kulp,” according to Turhalli.
“At the end of the massacre, at least 33 people were killed, including the Kurdish guerillas, in several locations,” he said.
He remembers running home and calling Amnesty International, asking the rights watchdog to report the attack to news outlets.
“They could hear the sounds of bullets and screams of people while we were talking. That was how the massacre was first covered by the media,” he explained.
Nahit Eren, lawyer of the families of some of the victims and vice president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, told Rudaw that the legal battle against the perpetrators has continued for a long time.
“The investigation has been going on for seven years now, but when the case was covered by the national media in 2012, the prosecutors ordered that the findings remain confidential. The file has been sent to the Diyarbakir chief public prosecutor's office recently in order to open a court case against some of the perpetrators of the massacre,” Eren said.
Yediyildiz, the then battalion commander of Kulp who ordered the soldiers to shoot the people on December 22, retired after he was promoted to his post as a brigadier general. He was allegedly one of the founders of JITEM (Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-Terror Unit), the controversial military wing of Turkey’s intelligence agency.
Yediyildiz died in a mysterious traffic accident in Trabzon in 1999, without being brought to court to answer for his deeds.
JITEM, whose existence was officially confirmed in 1973 by then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, has been implicated in numerous unsolved acts of violence in Turkey.
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