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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Bubbles burst at Ocalan trial
By Gareth JenkinsOn Tuesday, the trial of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan was adjourned for two weeks until 23 June to allow Ocalan's lawyers to prepare his defence. The court's decision was announced after Turkish prosecutors concluded their opening presentation by calling for Ocalan to be sentenced to death for murder and attempting to divide the Turkish state.
In his concluding remarks, Public Prosecutor Cevdet Volkan claimed that Ocalan had effectively incriminated himself over the previous week of questioning by admitting responsibility for the PKK's 15-year-old insurgency in southeast Turkey which has claimed an estimated 35,000 lives.
When the trial began on 31 May on the prison island of Imrali, some 60 kilometres south of Istanbul, most observers expected Ocalan to use the extensive press coverage as a platform to defend both Kurdish nationalism and the PKK. But he has instead chosen to plead for his life, offering to work for peace if he is spared the death sentence. Moreover, many of his statements were confused and contradictory. Although he has repeatedly assured the Turkish authorities that he will be able to bring all the PKK militants down from the mountains within three months, if he is allowed to live, Ocalan has also denied responsibility for both the civilian massacres perpetrated by the PKK and the numerous executions of dissenters within its own ranks, claiming that they were all carried out by units over which he had no control. Perhaps most bizarrely, last week Ocalan declared that he was a devout admirer of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic who ruthlessly suppressed a series of Kurdish rebellions in the 1920s. Then he added that the PKK had merely been exercising its right to self-defence as enshrined in the United Nations charter and the Turkish Constitution.
Despite the huge amount of evidence cited, including documents, wireless intercepts and the testimony of former PKK members, the prosecutors have for their part made little attempt to prove Ocalan's guilt, appealing more to the judges' emotions than their intellect.
Last week the parents of several of the soldiers slain by the PKK gave heart-rending statements in court about the loss of their sons. Yet the prosecutors brought no evidence to implicate Ocalan in the specific incidents that led to those soldiers' deaths.
But then, neither are Ocalan's lawyers expected to attempt to prove their client's innocence, choosing rather to argue that the PKK and the Turkish security forces are engaged in a "medium-sized war" in which atrocities have been committed on both sides.
Privately, even Ocalan's lawyers admit that they have little doubt about the outcome of the trial. Turkish officials are predicting that the legal process will be concluded in early July. There is no question that the sentence will be death.
"There will be considerable public pressure for execution, because the public is very angry," said Jonathan Sugden, Human Rights Watch's Turkey representative, noting that no executions have been carried out in Turkey since the early 1980s. "A resumption of executions would be the single most serious retrograde step that one could imagine."
