Hezbollah (Turkey)

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The Hizbullah (Turkey) ( Kurdish : Hizbullahî Kurdî ) was a violent Kurdish Islamist organization that was founded in Diyarbakır in the early 1980s . The Kurdish Hezbollah is striving to establish an independent Islamic state based on the Iranian model. It is called "Kurdish Hezbollah" or "Turkish Hezbollah". The Hezbollah directed its violence against dissenters, its own members and the Kurdistan Workers' Party . Their leader was Hüseyin Velioğlu . In 2000 Velioğlu was shot and the organization was destroyed.

Surname

The name of the organization ( Arabic حزب الله) means "party of God" and is of Koranic origin. Hezbollah took the Iranian Hezbollah as a model for choosing a name and radical orientation , but in contrast to her, it is recruited from Sunni Muslims.

ideology

Fidan Güngör, one of the founding members of the organization, declared the question of how to get Islam to rule life as the central concern of Hezbollah. In his opinion, few people should be trained as cadres in the initial phase. Molla Mansur Güzelsoy provided the justification for the use of force. The degenerate and rotten social fabric cannot be reformed. Everything has to be torn down and the structure rebuilt. That couldn't be done without violence. Hezbollah viewed the existing system as Jāhilīya .

history

The following people took part in the preparatory meetings in 1979 and 1980: Ekrem Baytap, Mehmet Kaya, Gudbettin Gök, Tevfik Durmaz, Zübeyir Gümüş and Ali Ateş. The first group came mainly from the Kurdish Batman. At first it was limited to tebliğ (proclamation, proselytizing ). People met in bookstores, mosques and teahouses, e.g. B. at the Cem Kitabevi bookstore in Batman, owned by Ekrem Baytap. Hüseyin Velioğlu and Abdullah Yiğit later joined them and the headquarters of Hezbollah relocated to Diyarbakır, which, given the state of emergency shortly after the 1980 coup, caused speculation.

The inaugural session then took place in Diyarbakır at the Vahdet Kitabevi bookstore owned by Abdulvahap Ekinci. Participants were Fidan Güngör, Hüseyin Velioğlu, Ubeydullah Dalar, Abdullah Yiğit (Mehmet Ali Bilici), Mansur Güzelsoy.

Parallel to this, discussion groups with seven to eight participants from Akıncılar or MHP circles also developed in Kasımpaşa in 1981 . From 1983 this branch made a name for itself through robbery. Participants of the circle in Batman from Cem Kitabevi attended the meetings in Istanbul from 1981 to 1983. Members of the group were caught in 1984 after robbing a jeweler in Istanbul. When interrogated, they claim to be members of Hezbollah. During house searches, weapons and documents were found confirming this. In total, the group is said to have committed 19 attacks. The goal is to found an Islamic state. The raids were based on the example of the raids of the Prophet against the infidel Meccans.

In 1981 Fidan Güngör founded the Menzil bookshop . Hüseyin Velioğlu founded the İlim bookstore in 1982 . Until 1987 the groups that formed around the bookstores Menzil and İlim worked together.

Other groups within Hezbollah were named: Tevhid , led by Nurettin Şirin and Mehmet Şahin; Yeryüzü , led by Burhan Kavuncu.

Regional centers

Batman

The İlim Kitabevi bookstore was located here. The Menzil wing organized itself here as Fecir-Grubu. According to the police, the religious leader was İhsan Yeşilırmak, the secular Giyasettin Uğur. Both were murdered by supporters of the İlim wing. In Batman, the vast majority of people died in clashes with the PKK or within Hezbollah.

Silvan

For a long time the center of Hizbullah was located here in the village of Susa . The PKK committed a massacre in the village. From 1992 the İlim wing ruled. The leader was a Molla named Mele Mehmet.

Diyarbakır

Diyarbakır was the founding city of the organization. The Bağlar district has long been considered a liberated zone for Hezbollah.

Other regional focuses

Other regional focuses were Mardin, Van and Gaziantep. In Gaziantep, Hezbollah appeared under the name Vasat. The bomb attack on September 14, 1997 on a book stand in a bookstore that sold the Bible at a book fair became known. A child died in the process. In early 2000, the Vasat faction in Gaziantep started threatening and blackmailing imams. Other regional centers were Malatya, Adıyaman and Şanlıurfa.

Conflict between Menzil and İlim

Disagreements on leadership style and the start of armed actions led to the separation of the two wings in 1987 when Hüseyin Velioğlu moved his İlim bookstore to Batman . The so-called İlim Wing, led by Hüseyin Velioğlu, insisted on starting the armed struggle immediately. Güngör first wanted to create a sufficient number of cadres and then take up armed struggle. Velioğlu wanted to take up the fight immediately. At a meeting between the two leaders to resolve the conflict in the village of Yolaç , Velioğlu Güngör is said to have threatened to imprison him if he did not take up arms immediately. As a result, there was a bloody confrontation between the two wings. Another reason for the bloody clashes between İlim and Menzil was the power struggle between Güngör and Velioğlu. It was also about profit from ransoms, donations ( fitre , zekât , infak ) or sacrificial animal skins .

At the beginning of the 1990s, the İlim wing made a name for itself with the murders of PKK sympathizers . The undisputed leader of the İlim Wing, Hüseyin Velioğlu, began his studies in 1972 at the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University . During his studies he had contacts to Milli Türk Talebe Birliği (National Turkish Student Union) and Akıncılar Derneği ("Association of champions").

Along with Batman, Hezbollah was most strongly organized in Cizre County, Şırnak Province , Nusaybin County, Mardin Province, and Silvan County, Diyarbakır Province . Many murders happened there. For a long time the organization used the village of Yolaç as a base. Both wings were initially represented in Silvan until the İlim wing gained the upper hand in 1992.

Indications of cooperation with the state

It is considered certain that members of the security apparatus supported Hezbollah. For example, weapons were seized during searches against the Vasat group in Gaziantep. During interrogation, the person responsible for the armed struggle, Mehmet Yıldırım, stated that the weapons and explosives had been obtained from a riot police from Siirt. He was arrested. Interior Minister Mehmet Ağar also admitted in his testimony to the Constitutional and Justice Committee on January 27, 2000 that there may have been police officers who had sympathy for Hezbollah's goals. The politician and former minister Fikri Sağlar said in an interview with the magazine Siyah-Beyaz (black and white) that the army not only used Hezbollah, but founded and promoted it. He claimed that a decision to do so was taken in 1985. The then governor for the area under a state of emergency , Ünal Erkan, told Milliyet that they had no intention of disbanding militant organizations until the PKK was eliminated.

The magazine "2000'e Doğru" on February 16, 1992 reported that, according to eyewitnesses and Hizbullah sympathizers, members of the organization were trained in Diyarbakır at the headquarters of the rapid reaction force. According to a guard, some people with beards and typical harem pants came to the headquarters of the Rapid Reaction Force around midnight and held a meeting there. Two days after this article appeared, the author, Halit Güngen, was murdered by unknown persons.

Namık Tarancı, who worked for the weekly Gerçek in Diyarbakır, was shot dead on November 20, 1992. In the edition of Gerçek before his death there were reports of the state and Hezbollah. Hafız Akdemir, a journalist from Özgür Gündem , was shot dead on June 8, 1992 in Diyarbakır. He had reported that a man suspected of murder on behalf of Hezbollah was released after six weeks without appearing in court.

Murders and persecution

Characteristic of Hezbollah's acts of violence was the use of the Makarov type pistol or a copy of this 9 mm pistol from northern Iraq, in contrast to the PKK, which used Kalashnikovs and called them keleş . Hezbollah enforcers usually shot their victims in the neck. The weapons for a planned attack were handed over by courier. Sometimes hand grenades or butcher knives ( satır ) are used. These knives were called sallama . This group of perpetrators was called satırcılar , but there were concerns about them within the organization.

According to police investigations, captured Hezbollah members were ordered to commit suicide if there was a risk that they would collapse under interrogation. The organization's suicides have been declared martyrs. The case of Abdulsamet İrdem ("the flower of Hezbollah") is an example of this. In the mosques of Hezbollah, money was collected monthly for the relatives of the Şuheda . To make police investigations more difficult, the Hizbullah used code names based on a difficult to understand system called çaprazkod (for example, cross- coding ), in which a member receives different code names from different levels of hierarchy.

Between 1990 and 1995, Hezbollah's political murders were particularly directed against PKK supporters. The state was first targeted in 1996. Activists shot at members of a special police force in Pirinçlik. At the beginning of 2000 the number of internal accounts escalated. Followers who had been interrogated by the police were also killed as alleged agents.

The İlim wing killed the Menzil supporters and founding members Ubeydullah Dalar (December 1992) and Fidan Güngör on September 12, 1994. In mid-December 1999, kidnappings of Kurdish entrepreneurs from Nurcu circles began in Istanbul. For example, İzettin Yıldırım, whose body and six others were to be discovered in Kartal on January 28, 2000, disappeared. Meanwhile, the gendarmerie and police in the Kurdish regions in Diyarbakır, chaired by Special Governor Gökhan Aydıner, gathered to coordinate the action against the Hezbollah.

During the operation in Beykoz on January 17, 2000, Hüseyin Velioğlu was killed and Edip Gümüş and Cemal Tutar were arrested. Edip Gümüş, born in Batman in 1958, is said to have been the military head of Hizbullah. Born in Diyarbakır in 1972, Cemal Tutar is believed to have belonged to the armed wing.

On February 3, 2000, the Ministry of the Interior held a briefing for 59 journalists. It was u. a. said:

"400 PKK members and 200 Hezbollah people were killed in armed clashes between the PKK and Hezbollah between 1992 and 1995. 50 people were killed in internal clashes at Hezbollah in 1993. There are currently 696 members of radical Islamic organizations in prison , 506 of them belong to Hezbollah. Since January 17th, 1,073 people have been arrested as alleged Hezbollah people in 44 provinces. 30 teachers and 21 preachers are among them. "

Hezbollah proceeded as follows. People were kidnapped, interrogated, the interrogations recorded on tapes, and the tapes sent to higher-level organizations within the organization. These then ordered a “fine” ( diyet ) as a ransom. Those whose "offenses" were too serious were executed. From 2000, numerous bodies were discovered in Hezbollah torture centers in Turkey. These houses were called Mezar Evleri ( burial houses) and the Hizbullah received the nickname Hizbul Vahşet (“Party of Barbarism”) in the Turkish public. One of the most prominent victims was Konca Kuriş .

On February 19, 2000, a meeting of security experts was held in Van. Here the result of the police operations in 54 (of 81) provinces since January 17 with 1,757 arrested militants, of whom 858 were in custody and 707 were released, 7 militants killed and 5 police officers killed as well as 59 bodies found was given.

In the period that followed, mass trials of alleged Hezbollah supporters were opened in Diyarbakır and other cities, although violent crimes did not play a role in all cases. In many of these trials, defendants made allegations of torture. Some of them are in urgent appeals from Amnesty International documented. In the trial in which Edip Gümüş and Cemal Tutar were also charged, the defendant Fahrettin Özdemir said at the hearing before the Diyarbakır State Security Court on July 10, 2000 that he had been detained for 59 days and was tortured. At the September 11, 2000 trial, Cemal Tutar said he had been detained by the police for 180 days.

In 2005, 22 Hezbollah members were found guilty of 91 murder cases before the 6th Great Criminal Chamber in Diyarbakir and sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment.

In 2011, through a reform law of the AKP government, 20 Hezbollah members who are believed to have been guilty of the multiple murders of up to 50 people without being convicted were released from prison.

organization

The highest decision- making body was named by Hizbullah Şura (council or body). The Şura is made up of high-ranking political (religious) and military functionaries. There were also representatives for logistics, media and the public in the Şura. Below the Şura there was the political and the military wing. In the political wing, a distinction was made between tebliğci (messenger), şeyda (for mosque groups) and mele (for the mullas who lead a group). Hezbollah organized (e) itself mainly in mosques , secondary schools, in the student dormitories and in the youth organizations of the parties. There were units for this in the political wing. The political wing also includes an intelligence unit.

The military wing is also known as the cihat grubu (group of holy war). In the individual action groups, the tasks were divided into information gathering, supervisor and executor. The executive unit ( icra birimi ) in the military wing had a special unit for interrogations and executions. After a suspect was abducted, they were interrogated and had only one chance of survival if they showed remorse (renounced the matter).

There are contradicting statements about the organizational strength of Hezbollah. Mehmet Faraç cites "findings" at a "Hezbollah summit" in Diyarbakır (with security experts from 12 provinces) when he spoke of 20,000 members (including 4,000 armed militants). The netbul website states that 6,000 CVs were found in the operations against Hezbollah , of which 2,000 were tetikçi (executors). At the meeting of security experts in Van on February 19, 2000, then chairman of the intelligence service in the Directorate General for Security (Supreme Police Directorate), Kazım Abanos, said that 2,000 handwritten résumés were found in the operations against Hezbollah.

Activities at the legal level

In 2003, Hizbullah sympathizers founded the Association of Solidarity with the Oppressed (tr: Mustazaflar ile Dayanışma Derneği , short: Mustazaf Der). The center of the party was in Diyarbakır , but such associations were also founded in İstanbul , Mersin , Konya and Adana . They organized demonstrations against both the Muhammad cartoons and for the Prophet's birthday (known as Mawlid an-Nabi ). A demonstration in Diyarbakir in 2006 is said to have taken part in 150,000 people.

On April 20, 2010, the association was banned by a court in Diyarbakir. The Court of Cassation confirmed the ban on May 11, 2012. The move was justified by the fact that the aim of the association with ties to Hizbullah was to introduce Sharia law.

On December 17, 2012, an application was made to the Ministry of the Interior to found the Free Cause Party (tr: Hür Dava Partisi or Hüda Par for short ). Within a very short time, offices of the party were opened in many provinces and district cities in Turkey.

View of the Islamic press

The Islamic-oriented Turkish press initially reported benevolently about Hezbollah's actions against the PKK. Ever since it became clear that Hezbollah was using violence against other Muslims, they have seen it as an anti-Islamic organization founded by the state and later taken over by the Mossad and other intelligence services.

literature

Web links

Turkish sources:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Faik Bulut: Kod Adı Hizbullah. Türkiye Hizbullahı'nın Anatomisi. Istanbul 1999, p. 21
  2. ↑ Fidan Gungor: Teoriden Pratiğe İslami Hareket. Istanbul 1997, p. 20
  3. ↑ Faik Bulut: Kod Adı Hizbullah. Türkiye Hizbullahı'nın Anatomisi. Istanbul 1999, p. 22f.
  4. ↑ Faik Bulut: Kod Adı Hizbullah. Türkiye Hizbullahı'nın Anatomisi. Istanbul 1999, pp. 60f.
  5. ^ Cumhuriyet report of April 24, 1998
  6. ↑ Faik Bulut: Kod Adı Hizbullah. Türkiye Hizbullahı'nın Anatomisi. Istanbul 1999, p. 62
  7. ↑ Faik Bulut: Kod Adı Hizbullah. Türkiye Hizbullahı'nın Anatomisi. Istanbul 1999, p. 63f.
  8. ^ Turkish sympathy for militants grows ( Memento from September 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Common Dreams News Center
  9. ↑ See parliamentary report from the daily Cumhuriyet of February 2, 2000 .
  10. ↑ Daily newspaper Radikal of July 3, 1997 ( Memento of January 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ a b c Mehmet Faraç in Cumhuriyet on January 19, 2000
  12. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, p. 61
  13. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, SS 64ff.
  14. ^ Human Rights Watch: What is Turkey's Hizbullah?
  15. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, p. 81
  16. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, p. 97
  17. ↑ Quoted in Human Rights Watch (HRW) report with reference to the book by Faik Bulut and Mehmet Farac: Kod Adı: Hizbullah (alias: Hizbullah), Ozan Verlag, March 1999.
  18. ↑ Milliyet daily newspaper, February 17, 1993
  19. ↑ a b See the report by HRW
  20. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, p. 176ff.
  21. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, p. 34f.
  22. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, p. 78
  23. ^ Annual report 2000 of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (in Turkish), p. 51
  24. ↑ Mehmet Faraç: Hizbullah'ın Kanlı Yolculuğu. Istanbul 2002, p. 29.
  25. ↑ a b See the corresponding report in Hürriyet of February 20, 2000
  26. ↑ These include: EXTRA 64/01 of September 14, 2001 (Hacı Bayancık), UA 218/01 of September 4, 2001 (Hacı Elhunisuni), UA 209/01 of August 22, 2001 (Yasın Karadağ), UA 194/10 from July 31, 2001 (Edip Balık), UA 317/00 from October 17, 2000 (Fesih and Hatice Güler)
  27. ↑ Annual report 2000 of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (in Turkish), p. 29
  28. ↑ See daily newspaper Hürriyet of April 2, 2005
  29. ↑ Berlin subscription newspaper Der Tagesspiegel : Radical Islamists in Turkey benefit from reform law , accessed on January 6, 2011
  30. ↑ The information is taken from the statements by Mehmet Faraç from January 19, 2000 .
  31. ↑ See this page on the Internet
  32. ↑ The information can be found on this page ( Memento from February 23, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  33. ↑ a b See a message from Bianet on April 13, 2013 Hizbullah: Tebliğ, Cemaat, Cihat ; Accessed April 16, 2013
  34. ↑ See an article in the International Relation and Security Network in Zurich on June 15, 2010, written by Gareth Jenkins A New Front in the PKK Insurgency , accessed on April 15, 2013
  35. ↑ a b See a report by the Turkish Democratic Forum. Will Hezbollah be active again? dated April 2013, accessed April 16, 2013
  36. ↑ See a corresponding message on the party's website  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Turkish; Accessed April 16, 2013@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.hudapar.org  
  37. ↑ Ruşen Çakır: Derin Hizbullah. İslamcı Şiddetin Geleceği. Istanbul 2011, p. 23.