Slain Human Rights Lawyer Warned of Turkey’s “Existential Crisis”

The murder of Tahir Elçi, who survived torture as a young Kurdish activist to become Turkey’s leading human rights lawyer, sparked street demonstrations in most of Turkey’s major cities this weekend.

Elçi, 49, was shot dead in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır on Saturday when gunfire erupted immediately following a press conference at a peace rally. At the rally, Elçi had said, in response to the renewed armed conflict consuming the predominantly Kurdish region since July, “We do not want guns, clashes and operations here.”

I had seen Tahir Elçi just days before, at a meeting organized by the Open Society Justice Initiative in Istanbul. Before an international gathering of anti-torture activists, he spoke powerfully about how he and others had used Turkish courts and the European Court of Human Rights to hold Turkish authorities accountable for torture, enforced disappearances, unlawful killings, arbitrary detention and other grave crimes. Since the early 1990s, Elçi had defended human rights cases in the southeast, later becoming president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association. He also remarked hopefully that recent advancements in forensic science are improving prospects for holding perpetrators accountable.

But he also spoke soberly of the limitations of what courts can achieve. He noted, for example, that governments often respond to sanctions not by prohibiting torture, but by merely adjusting the techniques used to leave behind less evidence: fewer cuts, contusions, burns, and broken bones. He was open-eyed about the ways states find to avoid non-compliance with international legal norms.

Indeed, the last research he shared with me was his organization’s report documenting civilian deaths and injuries cause by security operations in the southeast during an ostensible eight-day “curfew” in September.

He was certainly not the only such critic. But what struck me most powerfully was his assertion at the Istanbul meeting that Turkey is currently in an “existential crisis,” as the country’s armed conflict in the southeast and its already fraught domestic situation are rocked again and again by traumatic events stemming from the vicious civil war in neighboring Syria.

Within hours of the murder, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davudoğlu had pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice. He suggested that Elçi was either caught in crossfire or was assassinated, calling his death “an attack on peace and harmony in Turkey.” The thousands who have took to the streets of Diyarbakır, Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir crying “we are all Tahir Elçi” and “you can’t kill us all” are unlikely to be silenced—although in Istanbul police used tear gas and water-cannon to break up the protests. 

But the violence and impunity they and Tahir Elçi have been challenging are substantial, if not overwhelming. Freedom of speech has been a particular casualty in Turkey. In 2012 and 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent watchdog group, ranked Turkey as “the world’s top press jailor.” The peaceful environmental sit-in in Istanbul to protest an urban development plan for the Taksim Gezi Park was met in 2013 with police setting fire to protesters’ tents and, according to Amnesty International, with subsequent “attempts by the authorities to punish the protest movement … while police officers who used abusive force have yet to face justice.”

The November 1 general elections gave President Recep Tayyeb Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) a convincing mandate to keep their grip on Turkish politics firm for the foreseeable future.

As it turned out, the existential crisis was an existential threat to Tahir personally. He had been receiving death threats. He was already under orders not to leave Turkey pending his April trial on terrorism-related charges for expressing his opinion in a CNN Turkey interview in October that, contrary to the government’s position, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is not a terrorist organization. The very courts he had challenged repeatedly over the course of his legal career would soon consider eliminating him from public life with a sentence of up to eight years in prison. But before that could happen, he was killed by a bullet, in front of a crowd of his supporters, in his political base, in broad daylight.

No one has yet been questioned in connection with the murder; media reports have noted that more than one political faction may have had an interest in killing him. 

Meanwhile, the investigation into Tahir Elçi's death, and the deaths of two police officers also killed, is already being thwarted. According to the Reuters news agency, Diyarbakir city chief prosecutor Ramazan Solmaz said prosecutors and police forensic teams working at the site of the killings were forced to flee today when militants opened fire and threw explosives at an armored police vehicle. A vigorous, independent investigation into Tahir Elçi’s murder and timely prosecution and punishment of his killers would serve as a compelling vital sign for Turkey’s weakened body politic.