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Follow-up
Yurkovsky, a researcher for the Committee to Protect Journalists, recently visited Turkey to investigate attacks against journalists.
Trouble is nothing new for the weekly newspaper Yeni Ulke (New Country), which for the past two years has been reporting extensively on the status of Turkey's long-suppressed Kurdish people, numbering some ten million. Before the paper's first issue even came out, its bureau in Diyarbakir, the capital of Turkish Kurdistan, had been fire-bombed (see "Turkey: Testing the Limits," CJR, November, 1991 / December, 1991).
Terrifying as that attack was, it was merely a precursor to the latest rash of violence directed against those who report the news for Yeni Ulke and other Turkish publications sympathetic to the Kurds. Since last January, eleven journalists have been killed in the country's predominantly Kurdish southeast, five more than were killed during the same period in the fighting in what was formerly Yugoslavia. All but two of them worked for pro-Kurdish or leftist publications, and colleagues of the victims suspect that, in almost all of these assassinations, the state may have played a role.
Since 1984, southeastern Turkey has been the scene of fighting between state forces and guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), whose aim is to establish a separate state. The journalists killed this year, however, have not been caught in crossfire or shot at in areas of conflict; they have been gunned down execution-style.
Three of the victims worked for Yeni Ulke. A new daily, Ozgur Gundem (Free Agenda) -- which some say has a larger circulation in Diyarbakir proper than any of the national dailies -- has lost four contributors to assassins' bullets. The victims generally wrote on one of three topics: the counter-guerrillas, a secret state security force that is allegedly active in the southeast; Hizbullah, an Islamic organization of Kurds from Turkey suspected of collaborating with security forces; and abuses by the police and military.
There is little reason to believe that the government is conducting serious investigations. In interviews this past September, Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel and Interior Minister Ismet Sezgin took the contradictory position of ruling out the possibility of a state role while asserting that investigations had not been concluded. Both had previously described the dead journalists as "militants."
