Start date June 20, 1987 | ||
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The Pinarcik Massacre is the name given to a 20 June 1987 event in which 30 Kurdish civilians were killed in the village of Pınarcık, in the Mardin Province of Turkey. The dead consisted of eight village guards, sixteen children and eight women. The attack was carried out by the PKK because residents of the village had enlisted in the village guard militia.
Contents
The PKK claimed the attack in the June 1987 issue of Serxwebûn, the monthly periodical of its central committee.
Background
PKK rebels had previously come to Pınarcık, a small village of about 60 people in Mardin Province, nestled between two hilltops, about 10 miles from the nearest main Mardin-Omerli road. Once or twice before rebels had turned up on the village outskirts, firing off a few warning shots and leaving notes that warned the men to quit the state-financed village guard militia. The PKK had begun a campaign in January 1987 to stop people joining the village guards.
Incident
One June evening in 1987, men who were apparently PKK rebels partly encircled Pınarcık. It was later at night where one of eight Pınarcık's Turkish state-financed village guard recalled that the attackers shouted at them to surrender, but the guards apparently did not pay much attention.
The attackers fired directly on the village. The guards fought back, but they were outnumbered nearly four-to-one and, as one man later complained, hobbled by a lack of sufficient ammunition. According to Turkish authorities, thirty men then descended upon the village and continued the shoot-out with the village guards. The firefight lasted more than two hours. At the end, 30 people were dead, including 16 children, 6 women and 8 men lay dead - shot by the attackers. According to the Ankara Domestic Service, the attackers attacked houses using hand grenades and Molotov cocktails, and fired on those fleeing the burning houses.
Aftermath
Serxwebûn, a publication of the PKK, stated that the massacre was a "noble action" carried out by the ARGK militant units of the PKK against village guards in its June 1987 issue. It further described the massacre as "the culmination of a series of actions" against "Turkish colonialism", which included an attack at a farm in Ceylanpınar, the "punishment" of an "agent teacher" and an attack against a Turkish army conwoy. Şemdin Sakık, a previous commander of the PKK, wrote that the massacre was ordered by Abdullah Öcalan himself and carried out by special forces under his command.
A day before the attack the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Turkey for its refusal to recognize the Armenian Genocide and issues regarding Kurdish rights, saying that they presented "insurmountable obstacles" ("unüberwindbare hindernisse") to Turkey's EU membership bid. After the Pınarcık attack, Turkish President Kenan Evren said this resolution had encouraged the PKK to attack Pınarcık to make sure Turkey would be excluded from the EU. Der Spiegel dismissed this claim as "hardly serious" ("kaum ernst gemeint").
The Turkish news agency "Hürriyet" claimed the attackers had come from Syria, whose border is about 25 km from Pınarcık. In July 1987 Prime Minister Turgut Özal signed an agreement with Syria under which Syria would remove PKK camps from its territory.
Ayhan Çarkın, then a police special forces officer, said in 2011 that he had visited Pınarcık immediately after the attack: "I went to that village. The smell of blood and gunpowder were everywhere." He claimed that the attack had been carried out by the secretive JİTEM unit of the Turkish Gendarmerie as an act of provocation. These statements directly contradicted his statements in 2002, where he said "I have collected the body of a 1.5 months-old baby myself. No one can prove that terrorism is right to me."
Turkish columnist Mehmet Ali Birand, who had distinguished himself for his attempts to write openly about the country's Kurdish issue, called it a crime of "historical" proportions.