4 - The Actors, Acts and Victims of State Violence

Summary

From the late 1980s until the early 2000s, the Turkish state engaged in a systematic policy in the Kurdish region to criminalise non-violent resistance and intimidate the local population it viewed as the PKK’s support base. Claiming legality from an emergency regime put in place in the name of counterterrorism, the government encouraged, enabled and rewarded its official and unofficial agents to engage in atrocities against an entire population it considered unworthy of constitutional protection. The impunity regime shielding government agents against accountability was sustained by judicial complicity, leaving Kurdish civilians legally naked vis-à-vis state violence. This chapter maps the acts, actors and victims of state violence in the Kurdish region. In an effort to put names and stories to statistics, it provides detailed factual accounts of four ECtHR cases corresponding to each of the four types of gross violations laid out earlier– extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, torture and forced displacement. Concluding the background part of the book, the chapter lays the ground for the subsequent empirical chapters.