The hardest, most violent, most courageous was General Dogan Güres in the fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). This was explained by journalist Ricardo Ginés in the monthly chronicle he has dedicated to him at the Avant-garde in Barcelona. The newspaper has titled “Enemy number one of the PKK” to the news, blurring the personality profile that shows the content, but it could have made it clearer that Turkey was one of the main perpetrators of the Kurdistan massacre in the 1990s.

“Until 1994,” writes Ginés,the war against what he considered a threat to Turkey’s unity led to thousands of deaths, thousands of missing persons, the leakage of some three million Kurds and the destruction of more than 3,000 villages and villages. The power of Güres from the military staff of Ankara has not had the same in cruelty as in modern Turkish history. Güres has written his heritage in letters of lead.”

The English Wikipedia, in the entry “Turkey–PKK conflict” with well-documented sources, specifies the victims of the war. Human rights organisations say that, in addition to the villages destroyed and the millions displaced, between 1984 and 2008 5,000 Turks and 35,000 Kurds, including 18,000 civilians, have died violently. Another 17,000 people remain missing and 119,000 people have been arrested by the Turkish authorities.

During this time, in 1993, the PKK, initially Marxist-Leninist, changed its arguments and expressed its intention not to divide Turkey, clarifying that leader Abdullah Öcalan wanted to negotiate broad autonomy. This did not alter the plans of the Turkish military.

Faced with the changes and negotiations proposed by Öcalan, the recently deceased General Güres said: "There is a separatist risk in Turkey. Ocalan's words are only short-term words used to deceive. Furthermore, the United States wants to see Turkey split up. And the European Union also wants Turkey to be weaker. And does NATO help us? Nothing.”

Güres was convinced that everyone wanted to hit the neck of Turkey, Syria and Iraq by helping the PKK, Iran against . . and that NATO did not help Turkey enough. It was no more than a way of talking, because then the NATO governments gave the Turkish military the weapons to carry out the great offensive of Kurdistan, at a very cheap price, as Güres later acknowledged. So the Netherlands gave them the armored vehicles, the American helicopters, and also the M-60 and Leopard tanks ...

Then Güres himself visited the military structures of the United States, and also Spain, to learn low intensity warfare (low-intensity war, counterposition or special war), which specialize in that. Because that was before 1990, it is not difficult to know with which Spanish generals would talk about the mechanics to organize the fight against terrorism.

Outsourcing dirty war

Jean-Louis Briquet presents in his book “Milieux criminels et pouvoir politique: les ressorts illicites de l’état” (Organized crime and political authority: non-legal instruments of the State) the most significant features of the lead era suffered by the Kurdistan in the early 1990s. “Les bandes ‘en uniform’ in Turquie” tells how since 1991 the Turkish military has outsourced many operations against the PKK to criminal groups [sous-traitance in original French].

As Prime Minister Tansu Ciller was in a hurry to quickly end the war against the PKK, he entrusted the counterinsurgency struggle to General Güres and to the military who guaranteed the hard line of the war.

On the one hand, the military encouraged the work of ultra-right paramilitary groups. On the other hand, some tribes chosen among the Kurds supported the organization of citizen militias against the PKK. By the end of the decade they had more than 100,000 armed members, paid by the Ankara Army.

The colonialists have often used in their wars those militiamen who are called the guardians of the peoples (Corucu). One of the main theorists of the special war, Frank Kitson, mentions those used by the British in Kenya, the native paramilitary groups organized by France in Indochina and then in Algeria, and a long time and so on. Later, the Peruvian Government frequently used this type of militias to deal with the Shining Path. The Kurdistan conflicts, on the other hand, were more unknown to us.

One of the leaders of the paramilitaries who fought dirty against the PKK, Sedat Buca, was enriched in exchange for the aid they received from the Ankara authorities in public works. These complicities came to light thanks to the accident in the town of Susurluk.

Susurlu became famous for a traffic accident on 3 November 1996 and was taken to Cruces Hospital. At the subsequent trial it would be thought that it was a planned murder. Inside the car was a curious group: The far-right Abdullah Catli, wanted by the police for murders and drug trafficking; her friend Gonca Us, known among the beauty contests; and Huseyin Kocadag, who was police chief in Istanbul. The fourth crew of the car survived. Sedat Bucak, a cooperating Kurdish businessman and parliamentarian. The four came from the meeting they held with Interior Minister Mehmet Agar at a nearby hotel. He was saved because he had been warned by another mafioso.

In the 1990s, there were also dirty wars between authorities with different prospects of waging war on the Kurds and ruling Turkey’s affairs. According to Turkish newspaper BGNNews, Army Chief Dogan Güres attempted to kill him with cyanide in the café and was arrested for shooting. Another soldier prevented him from drinking that coffee, especially because he was bitter.

In 1992, Güres recognized that Turkey was a military state. A woman was then the prime minister, Tansu Ciller. Retired from the Army in 1994, Dogan Güres became a deputy for Cyller in 1995.

As BGNNews put in the title of the news item, Dogan Güres has died taking his secrets with him. That is to say, the dirty war of a state within NATO.