Turkish Scandal Exposes Links Between Crime, State
                       Officials

                       By Kelly Couturier
                       Special to The Washington Post
                       Wednesday, January 1 1997; Page A21
                       © The Washington Post

                       ANKARA, Turkey -- A corruption scandal has been
                       rocking Turkey for the past two months, exposing
                       links between organized crime and government
                       officials and forcing the resignation of the
                       interior minister as well as the ouster of
                       Istanbul's police chief and a handful of other
                       security officers.

                       Daily front-page stories based on information
                       emerging from intelligence and police investigations
                       and disseminated by opposition politicians have
                       implicated other government officials in the
                       widening scandal -- including Tansu Ciller, who is
                       both foreign minister and deputy prime minister in
                       the conservative, Islamic party-led coalition
                       government, and her husband, Ozer Ciller. Tansu
                       Ciller has denied any wrongdoing.

                       At the heart of the furor are accusations that a
                       network of criminal gangs has infiltrated Turkey's
                       parliament, security forces and police apparatus.
                       The gangs, in return for helping rid government
                       officials of enemies, have been allowed to grow rich
                       through extortion, gambling, money laundering and
                       heroin trafficking, according to the accusations.

                       The crash of an armored Mercedes into a truck near
                       the southwestern town of Susurluk on a cold night in
                       November, which killed three of the four passengers
                       in the car, provided the clearest indication yet
                       that such clandestine connections could exist.

                       What began as a routine police investigation into
                       the accident showed that the Mercedes' passengers
                       included an ultranationalist fugitive, a top police
                       official, a member of parliament and the fugitive's
                       girlfriend, a former beauty contest winner. The
                       legislator was the only survivor.

                       The fugitive killed in the accident, Abdullah Catli,
                       has been wanted by the international law enforcement
                       agency Interpol since he escaped in 1990 from a
                       Swiss prison, where he was serving a sentence for
                       heroin trafficking. Catli was suspected of
                       involvement in a number of killings in Turkey,
                       including those of seven leftist students, and of
                       having helped Mehmet Ali Agca escape from prison in
                       Istanbul in 1979. Two years later, Agca shot Pope
                       John Paul II in an assassination attempt in Rome.

                       In testimony last week before the parliamentary
                       commission investigating the current scandal, a top
                       intelligence official acknowledged that Turkey's
                       intelligence agency had used Catli for "operations
                       carried out in foreign countries," according to the
                       newspaper Hurriyet. The official, Mehmet Eymur, said
                       Catli was employed by the National Intelligence
                       Organization following the 1980 military coup in
                       Turkey.

                       "We used Catli after the 1980 coup even though we
                       knew this was wrong," Eymur was quoted by Hurriyet
                       as saying. "But we gave up after a while because of
                       a rumor that he had joined a narcotics ring."

                       Eymur said that Catli, who held a Turkish diplomatic
                       passport as well as a gun license bearing the
                       signature of Mehmet Agar, the interior minister who
                       resigned, had also worked for the national security
                       police agency.

                       According to press accounts, Turkish officials
                       employed criminals such as Catli to battle leftist
                       extremists and terrorists allied with Armenian
                       separatists in the 1970s and 1980s, and more
                       recently to help in the government's battle against
                       Kurdish separatist guerrillas of the Kurdish
                       Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting for 12
                       years to establish a Kurdish homeland in
                       southeastern Turkey.

                       The legislator who survived the Susurluk crash,
                       Sedat Bucak, is also involved in the government's
                       anti-PKK effort. Bucak, a member of Ciller's True
                       Path Party, is the leader of a clan that is
                       receiving millions of dollars from the government to
                       provide village guards to fight the PKK in the
                       southeastern provinces.

                       Opposition politicians and newspaper editorials have
                       criticized the government's policy of using Kurdish
                       clans, many of whom are suspected of being involved
                       in the thriving heroin trafficking in the region, in
                       its battle with the PKK.

                       "In the fight against [PKK] terrorism, the duties
                       which the state itself should fulfill have been
                       handed over to village guards who are part of the
                       clans and landlord system in the southeast," wrote
                       Cengiz Candar, a columnist with the mass-circulation
                       newspaper Sabah.

                       "The result is that we discern the existence of a
                       highly complicated, illegal and dirty network of
                       drug trafficking extending from the village guards
                       -- who have been placed under the protective wing of
                       the state -- to the security units who are in
                       contact with them and inevitably to the
                       politicians," Candar wrote.

                       Huseyin Kocadag, the police official killed in the
                       Susurluk crash, also had links to the government's
                       campaign against the PKK, having commanded special
                       anti-guerrilla teams at one point. Gonca Us, the
                       third person killed in the crash, reportedly was
                       Catli's girlfriend.

                       Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who critics say
                       has been reluctant to take action in the Susurluk
                       scandal because of the accusations concerning his
                       coalition partner, Ciller, said at a meeting of
                       party leaders called by President Suleyman Demirel
                       last month that the investigations of links between
                       criminals and the state "should definitely be
                       deepened and widened."

                       Erbakan was quoted as saying he was shocked by
                       intelligence reports that implicated 58 people,
                       including public officials, in organized crime. "We
                       are now being confronted with incidents we never
                       even imagined," he said. "At this stage we see that
                       all these should be investigated to get to the
                       bottom" of the scandal.

                       Demirel, meeting with party leaders, reiterated his
                       call for a thorough investigation but cautioned
                       against tarnishing the reputation of state
                       institutions. That led some political observers to
                       speculate that he will limit the probe.

                       Opposition politicians have clamored, along with the
                       press, for an intensive investigation into any
                       government links to criminals.

                       Mesut Yilmaz, leader of the opposition center-right
                       Motherland Party, who makes no secret of his enmity
                       for political rival Ciller, has given the
                       parliamentary commission documentation he said
                       proves links between the state and criminals.

                       Yilmaz, who has called for establishment of an
                       investigation committee with special powers, has
                       indirectly accused Ciller, a former prime minister,
                       of involvement in the scandal. Moreover, an
                       intelligence report published in the press accused
                       Ciller and Agar of setting up their own illegal
                       "gang within the state."

                       Ciller has denied the allegations but raised
                       eyebrows by publicly praising Catli, saying, "Those
                       who fire shots for the state are, for us, as
                       respectable as those who get shot for it."

                       As members of parliament, Ciller, Agar and Bucak
                       have immunity from prosecution, a situation that has
                       hampered the investigations so far, critics say.
                       Before a judicial body may investigate lawmakers,
                       parliament must strip them of their immunity.

                       Such a move against Ciller appears unlikely now,
                       given her party's strategic place in the governing
                       coalition. Erbakan, analysts say, will support her
                       as long as she helps to keep him and his Welfare
                       Party in power.

                       However, with reports that 14 members of parliament
                       are planning to desert Ciller's party and challenge
                       the coalition, the political aftershocks of the
                       Susurluk accident appear to be far from over.

                       @CAPTION: Prime Minister Erbakan now is being urged
                       to take action against Deputy Prime Minister Ciller.

                           © Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company