REVENGE, RESURGENCE, AND RESISTANCE

"You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."
~ quoted by Chris Floyd in "Global Eye: Sword Play," The Moscow Times.

The Turkish Revenge Brigade (Turk Intikam Tugayi--TIT) has claimed responisbility for the Amed bombing, as first reported by KurdishInfo. DozaMe has some great information on this news, including photos of the bomb used, provided by TIT on its website.

TIT is a branch of the Gray Wolves (MHP and Ulkucu Hareket) that was founded in 1969 at that premier institution, the School of Political Science at Ankara University. TIT has been involved in a lot of the deep shit of the Deep State, and they seem to specialize in assassinations. They were involved with the murder of the Turkish Cypriot journalist, Kutlu Adali, back in 1996:

The Cyprus Union of Journalists has protested to international unions of journalists about the cruelty of the Denktash regime in the Turkish-occupied northern part of the island, to bar a Union delegation to attend yesterday the funeral of murdered prominent Turkish Cypriot columnist, Kutlu Adali.

[ . . . ]

A group calling itself ''Turkish Revenge Brigade'' (TIT), an underground terrorist organisation of Turkey's right-wing fascist Grey Wolves group, claimed responsibility for the murder.

Adali was well known for his harsh criticism against the pseudo-state and its policy of implanting Turkish settlers in the occupied areas following the Turkish invasion of 1974 and occupation of 37 per cent of the island's territory.

Given what Adali was against, it's no wonder TIT iced him. Adali's wife later brought charges against the TC at the ECHR. One of the facts she submitted to the court includes the following:

200. On 8 July 1996 the pro-“TRNC” government newspaper Kıbrıs had reported that it had received a statement from a fascist group calling itself the Turkish Revenge Brigade claiming that they had killed Kutlu Adalı. This group was linked to the so-called “Grey Wolves”, the youth movement of the Turkish Nationalist Action Party. They had close and long-standing links with members of the Turkish armed forces, the Turkish police, the Turkish National Intelligence Service (“MIT”), the Turkish paramilitary apparatus, Turkish ministers, and the Turkish mafia. Moreover, two days after the killing of Mr Adalı, the applicant's family had received a telephone call from an anonymous person who had given the names of Mr Hüseyin Demirci and a man whose first name was Orhan, who she said were responsible for the murder. The applicant had discovered that Mr Demirci was a member of the “Grey Wolves” and of the CDO and that he was being paid by the security forces. Orhan was a colonel in the Turkish occupying forces. The applicant had given this information to the police, but they had failed to investigate properly. Despite her complaints to the police and the security forces, no steps had been taken to bring the perpetrators to justice.

That is taken from the judgement of the Strassbourg court on 31 March, 2005. Not only is the judgement an excellent read to get an idea of how these Gray Wolf organizations operate, but it also gives a feel for the whole idea of the occupation of Cyprus. We might as well consider it another good lesson on the brutality of the fascist Ankara regime, and of all those so-called civilized nations, like the US and Europe, who have forever supported this occupation. But then, it was "their boys" that did it, right?

TIT was also responsible for the attempted assassination against IHD's chairman, Akin Birdal, in 1998, from Amesty International:

However, in the immediate aftermath of the attempted murder the then Prime Minister claimed that the shooting was an ''internal settling of accounts'', linking the HRA to the PKK. In fact, investigations led to the indictment of members from an ultra-nationalist group, the ''Turkish Revenge Brigade'' (TIT), including a retired army officer and a serving gendarmerie officer. On 29 December 1999 nine men were sentenced to prison terms from one to 19 years in relation with this crime.

Now, this attempted assassination occured in Ankara and was widely condemned by the international community, thus the TC had to do something to save its image abroad. Kutlu Adali should have been so lucky to be murdered by TIT in Ankara. Of course, the TC and it's lapdog media set up the assassination attempt of Birdal by creating a media frenzy, from Info-Turk.be:

The would-be assassins who gunned down Turkey ís top human rights activist got their training, in secret, from a non-commissioned officer with neo-fascist sympathies serving with a top anti-terrorist intelligence unit.

[ . . . ]

Deretarla, just 17 years old, has told police that he was trained for the attack in a secret woodland camp north of Istanbul. His trainer was one Cengiz Ersever, a non-commissioned officer serving with the countryís paramilitary gendarmes.

[ . . . ]

According to the gunmenís own testimony, as widely reported here, he was targeted after the media printed the leaked testimony of former Kurdish guerrilla commander Semdin Sakik, who was snatched by a Turkish special forces unit earlier this year.

In a wide ranging series of allegations attributed to Sakik - some of which he has since denied - a long list of critics of the government and military were "named" as "Kurdish agents" and supporters of the Kurdistan Workersí Party (PKK) guerrilla force.

According to the alleged testimony of Sakik, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was supposed to have said that while Birdal "is not affiliated to the PKK, he is more PKK than anybody else in the organization".

Without Birdal, Ocalan allegedly said, the PKK "would not be able to establish the present influence we have in Europe".

The unsubstantiated claims, quickly denied by Birdal, gave a green light to Ersever, Deretarla and Eken, who had formed a covert death squad specifically to target such "enemies of the state."

"We decided to kill Akin Birdal when we read Sakik's testimonies in the dailies," the gunmen are said to have told the police.

According to evidence presented to the courts here, Ersever signed the two up alongside 15 others to form a death squad code-named the Turkish Revenge Brigade. All were members of the neo-fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) whose youth wing, the Gray Wolves, have been implicated in the murders of thousands of dissidents over the last three decades.

"I have scores of others in my list. Those who are the enemies of the Turkish military and the police are also my enemies," Ersever reportedly told police interrogators. The original Turkish Revenge Brigades killed dozens of left-wingers during the civil strife of the late 1970s. One brigade member, Mehmet Ali Agca, later tried to kill the Pope.

Remarkably, Ersever's name has come up before in similar contexts.

He was recently named by witnesses testifying at a parliamentary commission investigating the so-called Susurluk Affair.

The Turkish prime minister at the time, Mesut Yilmaz, clearly lied about the assassination attempt being an"internal settling of accounts" between PKK and IHD, when it was, in fact, a Deep State operation that he was trying to cover up. TIT was allegedly broken up in the wake of the trial of those guilty of the attempted assassination of Birdal, but as we have seen this week in Amed, the break-up never really happened.

TIT began to resurface again In 2005, when it sent death threats to Eren Keskin, and other leaders of IHD, according to Human Rights Watch. The same letter also notes other victims of TIT.

The big question is why is the Dirty War being renewed now?

The AKP has proven itself unreliable as far as US interests go, and has pulled the TC back from both the US and the EU, while cultivating Iran. The US would like to see a destabilization of the TC's domestic political situation in order to make it more dependent, and therefore more controllable, in preparation for America's dealings with Iran. The pashas are willing partners in this endeavor because their hands will remain firmly on all the levers of power.

Since Turkish national elections will take place next year, America's window of opportunity is open, with the engineers of the 1980 coup willing to subvert political mechanisms in order to avoid the image problems associated with military coups. The new anti-terror law is one example of this; the elections will be another. By avoiding the coup image problem, the invertebrates in the EU will be able to stand by idle, something that they do best.

In the meantime, the Kurdish people remain the unwilling sacrificial lambs to be forcibly offered on the altar of joint American-Turkish interests. Instead of "winning the hearts and minds" of the Kurds by genuine and concrete steps to ensure their full equality within the TC, both the US and TC are relying on their old, established methods of Gladio's heyday.

Hurriyet is carrying Joe Ralston's ironic reaction to the Amed bombing:

General Ralston for his part spoke yesterday about the large exposion Tuesday evening in Diyarbakir, promising to relay to President Bush details from the incident in Turkey's predominently Kurdish southeastern city. Ralston also promised that concrete steps would be taken in the US-Turkish anti-PKK coordination efforts, saying "The Turkish public will see some real advances."

All you have to say, Joe, is: "Our boys did it!"

Perhaps now is a good time for HPG to consider their own destabilization operations . . . in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. Such a move will suck away more resources from the fascist Ankara regime, helping to spin the whole game out of everyone's control and forcing them to the negotiation table.