Meghan Bodette
In response to systemic human rights violations committed by Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) groups in occupied areas of northern Syria, rights organizations have repeatedly called on Turkey to fulfil its international legal obligations as an occupying power and prevent and punish crimes.
This is the conventional liberal understanding of how rights should be protected under military occupation. However, it assumes that a state is not intentionally allowing violations to occur, and has the will and capability to stop them.
Historical evidence suggests that for Turkey and Syria, this is not the case. In fact, the tactics and pretexts Turkey has used to target minorities and dissidents for decades— from militarized governance and broad accusations of terrorism to arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and torture— are indistinguishable from those used by the SNA for the same reasons in occupied areas.
Within Turkey’s borders, military rule and states of emergency have been used to crush dissent and target civilians for decades— from the laws that laid the groundwork for the Dersim Massacre by codifying forced demographic change to the military regime of the 1980s to the military curfews enforced in Kurdish cities in the wake of Erdogan’s most recent crackdown.
While a Turkish-backed civilian government exists in occupied areas, armed groups are free to make arrests, confiscate property, and otherwise behave with impunity. Kurdish, Yezidi, and Christian civilians— and any civilians perceived as opposed to the occupation— effectively live under a military government. Kidnapping victims are not tried before civilian courts, and no civilian legal process exists for those who have had agricultural land, homes, and businesses confiscated or who attempt to seek justice for relatives who have been jailed or killed.
The SNA also uses accusations of terrorism to silence opposition and target minorities in the same way that Turkey does. Just this week, two young Kurdish women in Afrin city were arrested by Jaysh al Islam, an extremist group infamous for using caged civilians as human shields and bombing Kurdish neighborhoods with chemical weapons. The group accused the women of affiliation with the PKK.
Afrin Post, a local news source that frequently documents human rights violations in the area, revealed that both were civilians. The mother and siblings of one of the women had been targeted in a raid on their home the day she was arrested.
Such falsified terror charges are frequently used to silence and terrorize civilians in occupied areas. Dozens of people are kidnapped each month on accusations of “dealing with the Syrian Democratic Forces.” In one particularly absurd case, a woman was accused of involvement in an unclaimed bomb attack after complaining about the price of bread in Afrin.
This is indistinguishable from Turkish policy. As of June 2018, 10,286 people in Turkey were in prison for suspected links to the PKK— a catch-all charge for all who express the slightest opposition to autocratic and anti-Kurdish policy. In the past several weeks alone, dozens of people have been arrested, including elected HDP officials, journalists, and feminist activists.
In some cases, these illegal and arbitrary anti-state charges cross borders. A recent report from Syrians for Truth and Justice, a human rights monitor, identified dozens of Syrian civilians from areas occupied by Turkey during Operation Peace Spring who were illegally transferred to Turkey and jailed for violating Turkish law. Speaking to Al Monitor in May, a lawyer for some of the detainees warned that they had likely been tortured in custody and forced to make public statements.
Such inhumane treatment of Syrian civilians was not a one-time incident. Recently, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that several women were found naked in an illegal prison operated by the Hamza Division, a militia known for abhorrent treatment of civilians. Some of the women’s families had not heard anything about their whereabouts for over a year; one family was told their missing daughter had been killed.
Testimonies from other SNA prisons describe brutal torture and sexual violence. Civilians are regularly attacked and beaten in their homes in occupied areas. In the past month alone, there have been two reports of civilian deaths from torture in custody.
These scenes are reminiscent of the worst abuses of Turkey’s campaign against its Kurdish population in the 1980s and 1990s. Human rights advocates believe at least 1,353 people were forcibly disappeared, most of them in Kurdish regions after 1993. A parliamentary investigation found that in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, at least 650,000 people were jailed, 230,000 were put on trial, 299 died in prison, and 171 died from torture.
All of these measures are intended to crush dissent, alter demographics, and ensure that only those who accept narrow nationalist, conservative, authoritarian rule are able to express their opinions.
States and international organizations that act as though Turkey can change this behavior abroad while implementing the same policies at home are ignoring reality. Instead, the international community must confront and oppose these human rights violations wherever they occur. Decades of domestic authoritarianism in Kurdish regions of Turkey cannot be seen as separate from the brutality of the military occupation forced on Syrians.
For this reason, the only strategy to end these crimes is the one put forward by those who suffer from them in Turkey and Syria alike– an end to Turkish occupation of Kurdish regions, and a political resolution to the conflict that allows democracy and self-determination on both sides of the border.