The Turkish Mafia and the State

It happened on the evening of Sunday, 3 November 1996. Late-night television viewers in Turkey saw their programme interrupted by a line of text appearing under the picture. It was shocking news. Three people were killed in a traffic accident near the town of Susurluk in western Turkey and a fourth injured. Ever since the advent of commercial television, people in Turkey had grown accustomed to this kind of shock news. Every night there were sensational interruptions especially inserted to boost viewing ratings. In retrospect most of them were pretty insignificant. The people who died in this particular accident were police chief Huseyin Kocadag, a man by the name of Mehmet Ozbay and Ms Yonca Yucel. The injured man was Sedat Bucak, a member of Parliament from the province of Urfa in the southeast of the country and known as the commander of an army of village guards set up to protect that region from the PKK, the violent separatist movement of Kurds. A couple of pistols, machine guns and a set of silencers were found in the wreckage of the car. Half an hour later a new line of information appeared on the screen: the deceased ‘Mehmet Ozbay’ was really Abdullah Catli. His name will not mean much to Turks under the age of 30, but the older generation certainly knows him. In the 1970s, Catli was the vice-chairman of the national organisation of ulkucu (literally idealists) better known abroad as the Grey Wolves. He has been wanted by the Turkish authorities since 1978 as the suspect in a number of murders, one of them involving seven students. He was also wanted by Interpol, because he had been arrested by the French and Swiss police as a heroin dealer, but escaped from a Swiss prison in 1990. The woman who died in the crash was his girlfriend.