There have been armed conflicts of varying lengths of time and levels of intensity between Kurdish political movements and the Turkish state regarding the rights of Kurds and territorial sovereignty over northern Kurdistan (south-east Turkey) for almost a century. The longest and most severe of these conflicts has been that involving the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK), which has been ongoing for more than forty years now at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. The PKK launched its armed struggle against the Turkish state in August 1984. As the conflict developed into a fullblown guerrilla or asymmetric war, the state responded by establishing various new institutions, some of which had a paramilitary character. This book investigates the ways in which these paramilitary organisations emerged, functioned and were deactivated. The focus is placed on the most violent decade of the war, the notorious 1990s, the most intensely violent period in the hundred-year history of violence in northern Kurdistan.

It was in the middle of the decade, in 1996, when a Mercedes car carrying four people crashed into a truck near the township of Susurluk in western Turkey, triggering a public scandal. Three of the four occupants of the car died instantly: Abdullah Çatlı, Gonca Us (his girlfriend) and Hüseyin Kocadağ. Çatlı was a mafia leader and well-known radical right-wing militant wanted by Interpol for his involvement in assassinations, while Kocadağ was a director of the Istanbul School of Police. The other passenger was Sedat Bucak MP, head of a prominent Kurdish tribe (aşiret) that was regarded as the most significant part of the state-established Village Guards (Köy Korucuları), the largest paramilitary organisation in Turkey. The car was also full of sophisticated, unlicensed weapons.

The ‘Susurluk incident’ exposed the network of relationships between criminal and paramilitary organisations operating in northern Kurdistan, on the one hand, and state institutions and government authorities, on the other. These organisations ranged between the clandestine (such as local mafia gangs) and the legally enshrined (like the Village Guards). The MP in the car, Sedat Bucak, was known to be close to the then Turkish prime minister, Tansu Çiller, who stated her government's approach to the conflict with the PKK in blunt terms: ‘Those who shoot bullets and those who are the targets of bullets in the name of the state are both honourable … they are heroes’.