Group tries to shake terrorism label

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — The Kurdish Hezbollah, the Islamic group nicknamed “Hezbatrocity” because it is suspected of killing hundreds of Kurds in the 1990s, has resurfaced in southeastern Turkey as a charity calling itself the Association for the Oppressed.

It says it has renounced violence, highlighting a key dilemma in coping with the threat from militant Islam: Can militants with blood on their hands be trusted when they publicly renounce violence?

Huseyin Yildirim, an official in the group, admits that he carries a heavy weight on his shoulders. He never killed anyone, according to associates, but he was jailed for membership in Kurdish Hezbollah.

The radical Islamic group with no known connection with the Hezbollah of southern Lebanon, is accused of killing about 500 people in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s.

“Yes, some of our members were Hezbollah, but we are [now] opposed to violence, categorically,” Mr. Yildirim said in an interview at the organization’s headquarters in Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey’s biggest city.

“Our fight is against poverty, ignorance and all sources of social conflict,” he said.

In the 1990s, the Turkish Hezbollah fought a two-front war, against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Turkish state. It lost.

In 2000, police found torture chambers and grave-filled safe houses during a massive crackdown on the group, in which they arrested about 6,000 members. It earned the group its nickname, Hezbatrocity.

“Hezbollah did all this killing in the name of Islam,” said Celal Aygan, head of another Islamic association in Diyarbakir.

“People do not trust Mustazaflar,” he said, using the Turkish term for the NGO.

Still, the organization seems to be able to pull crowds bigger than the PKK, traditionally the strongest group in the region.

In February, during a Turkish army incursion against PKK camps in northern Iraq, 40,000 Islamists marched in Batman, near Diyarbakir, to protest Israeli attacks on the Palestinian territories.

Last month, thousands of people turned out in towns across Turkey when the NGO organized celebrations for the prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Inzar, an Istanbul-based monthly magazine close to Hezbollah, now boasts a circulation of nearly 10,000 copies.

The group “can become an influential power in southeast Turkey in the mold of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraq’s Mahdi Army and Hamas” in the Palestinian territories, warned a policy paper published in September by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Many local analysts think this sort of talk is exaggerated, a knee-jerk reaction to the religious-minded ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The AKP tripled its vote in Kurdish areas of Turkey during general elections last summer.

When 100,000 gathered in February 2006 during the Danish cartoon crisis, the media presented it as a Hezbollah march, says Bulent Yilmaz, head of a conservative local NGO.

“In fact, 95 percent were ordinary people. Kurds are close to their religion and always have been. None of the groups you see today — including this one — have come out of nowhere,” Mr. Yilmaz said.

“Personally, I’d be delighted to see signs of the Islamization the media is talking about. But I don’t,” he said.

Despite the group’s peaceful face, its rhetoric remains radical, with publications referring to Turkey’s secular regime as “taguti,” or sinful.

“If Islam comes to the fore, there won’t be any need left for fighting and killing,” said Sait Sahin, the soft-spoken head of the group’s Istanbul branch office.

A book published in 2004 and thought to have been written by the group’s Germany-based leader, Isa Altsoy, is more forthright.

“Imperialists and Zionists [used the Sept. 11 attacks to] launch a great war against Muslims … all around the world.

“Those who oppress us should know that if they don’t stop, we will turn their world into hell.”

Yet the NGO’s activities emphasize its rejection of violence and its focus on providing social services.

“We are a bridge between rich and poor,” Mr. Yildirim said, explaining how his group provides basic food for 300 poor families in Diyarbakir every month, working at night so as not to cause tensions with equally needy neighbors.

With permission from the local governor, eight doctors volunteering for the organization do medical tours of surrounding villages.

A member of the human rights group Mazlum-Der and no relation to Huseyin Yildirim, Nesip Yildirim thinks the group serves an important purpose.

“Hezbollah was like a closed box,” he said. “Coming out onto the street, as the NGO is doing, starts the socialization process, and that leads to moderation. That should be supported. These people must not be convinced they were wrong to choose the path of legality.”

Question marks do remain about the group, though, especially about its ambiguous attitude toward its brutal past.

A lawyer who has talked to former members of Hezbollah’s armed wing in jail, Mr. Aygan says many appear to regret what they did.

Asked about the group’s notorious torture cells, though, Mustazaflar’s Mr. Yildirim argues that the worst atrocities were the work of state agents in the group.

“The community only killed because it was attacked,” he says of Hezbollah’s PKK war.

Prominent Kurdish intellectual Hasim Hasimi thinks a second bout of violence is unlikely.

“War has brought suffering to the people of this region for 25 years, 40,000 have died, millions have lost their homes,” he said, referring to the larger war between the PKK and the Turkish state. “Support more violence and you lose what backing you have.”