Organized Crime, Asia Minor

From the book by Ryan Gingeras

The Ottoman state itself, depending upon one's perspective, was born out of the raiding of Byzantine lands by horsemen loyal to Osman Bey, founder of the Ottoman household. The slow transformation of Osman's petty fiefdom bordering Byzantine Constantinople into a massive state residing on three continents naturally did not leave the Ottoman Empire immune from the marauding the first Ottomans were initially known for...

It is in the seventeenth century that we see the initial signs of state decentralization in the Ottoman lands. Unlike the classic cases of France or Great Britain, two states that developed more consolidated, centralized forms of governance during the early modern period, Ottoman governance instead relied increasingly upon locally rooted power brokers as the main arbiters of imperial administration. The question of who would serve in such a capacity was largely the outcome of local competition between regional political factions. The decentralized structure of Ottoman imperial rule became ever more entrenched during the eighteenth century. By 1800, the collective authority, military potential, and even financial might of local lords (ayan) vastly overshadowed the sultan’s court in Istanbul.

Political and administrative decentralization in the Ottoman Empire, beginning in the seventeenth century, was arguably both a consequence and an expression of a second important precedent: the growing visibility and the politicization of banditry. Karen Barkey has convincingly demonstrated that, unlike in many of the emerging nation-states of Europe, a series of short-term, as opposed to long-term, strategies defined Istanbul’s responses to banditry and peasant rebellion during the seventeenth century. Among the strategies employed by the Ottoman capital was the recruitment of celalis, bandits, and would-be bandits into both the military and the provincial administration. Militarily, such a policy did hold certain immediate benefits. As the Ottoman Empire engaged in grander military campaigns, campaigns that demanded larger numbers of foot soldiers equipped with firearms, employing bandits and peasant rebels provided a stopgap resource for filling the ranks. In an empire where the capital exerted increasingly less influence in local affairs, bandits and rebels emerged to become the sort of provincial power brokers that became synonymous with this age of decentralization. Men such as Ali Pasha of Jannina, the great ayan of the western Balkans at the turn of the eighteenth century, assumed such heights through his earlier career as a bandit in what is today the borderlands of Albania and northern Greece...

[Mahmut II's] drive towards state centralization, and state-run reform, resulted in the mass elimination or suppression of provincial ayan lords, rebellious janissaries, and recalcitrant tribes in various corners of the empire... [however b]anditry, as well as other forms of organized criminal behavior, did not subside with the rise of the modern Ottoman state [now 'political banditry' would begin]...

Ironically, the first faction to successfully utilize armed gangs [çetes] as a means of projecting political control over the region was an indigenous movement with no official ties to any of the competing states in the Balkans. Founded in 1890 in the port city of Salonika, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) principally advocated the creation of an autonomous state in Macedonia that was largely outside of the control of Istanbul... within four years after the rise of the so-called Young Turks [who had toppled the autocratic Abdulhamit II, but became autocratic themselves], çete violence slowly returned to Macedonia with a vengeance. Finally, in the fall of 1912, the armies of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro marched into Macedonia with the support of local Christian armed bands, resulting in the final dismemberment of the Ottoman Balkans.

To be sure, the IMRO was no mafia. More importantly, one cannot find an Ottoman official who conceived of Macedonian militants as gangsters or members of some discrete organized crime outfit. Nevertheless, çete violence in Macedonia would have a lasting imprint upon future perceptions and interpretations of organized crime. The word çete, which is of Slavic and not Turkish origin, eventually became the staple term applied to contemporary gangs and criminal syndicates in the Republic of Turkey. Yet like the more historical usage of eşkiya, çete may still be applied more loosely to groups and activities exclusive of crime. Çete and çetecilik, for example, may be used to describe a “guerrilla” or “paramilitary activity,” two forms of behavior that could just as easily be undertaken by legitimate or official actors.

Çete violence in Macedonia had a direct effect upon many of the leaders of the late Ottoman state, as well as many of the founders of the Turkish Republic. Erik Jan Zürcher has convincingly demonstrated that the Young Turk generation of officers and bureaucrats were rooted in the events that transpired in Macedonia between the 1870s and 1912. A majority of the seminal members of the Committee of the Union and Progress (CUP), the clandestine party that secretly organized the 1908 revolution, were born in the southern Balkans. A great many more officers and officials who came to lead or serve the Young Turk state had experienced the violence first hand as local administrators or military commanders...

Although it was the regular armies of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria that were responsible for the partitioning of Ottoman Macedonia, local çetes, after years of terrorizing local administrators, security personnel, and civilians, appeared to have helped blaze their path to victory. As the empire limped towards the outbreak of the First World War, the apparent strength of and threat posed by Greek and Armenian çetes weighed heavily upon the minds of many within the capital...

[At the opposite end] the CUP appropriated or formed çetes of local Muslims [of its own] during the spring and summer of 1908. It was at the head of their own bands of Muslim (mostly Albanian) paramilitaries that such heroes of the Young Turk Revolution as Ahmet Niyazi and Enver were launched into fame and political prominence.

Like the IMRO, it would be grossly inaccurate to consider the CUP’s çetes in Macedonia anything like organized crime (even though their acts were still officially considered criminal). Yet, unlike the IMRO, it is clear that many within the ranks of the CUP considered the formation of state-backed gangs to be a legitimate and effective tool in combating a similar foe. In an era when the empire seemed beset on all sides by uncompromising and violent adversaries both inside and outside the imperial borders, fighting separatists and irredentists (both real and imaginary as it would turn out) with their own methods was deemed warranted...

Since the formal collapse of the Young Turk regime in 1918, organizing, facilitating, supporting, and praising the activities of pro-government gangs persists in the contemporary Republic of Turkey. Even the use of the term çete has remained consistent. What has changed, perhaps, is the nature or character of the modern “çeteci.” While a member of a CUP-sponsored gang may have been a shepherd, an unemployed field hand, or refugee pressed into service, a çeteci in contemporary parlance denotes an individual who is nothing less than a thug or a gangster. A çeteci today would almost certainly engage in a criminal trade like arms or drug trafficking...

By the end of the 1700s, particularly with the loss of the Crimea at the hands of imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire would also experience the first throes of an ongoing series of refugee crises. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatar refugees during the first half of the nineteenth century foreshadowed even larger waves of migrants destined to settle within the confines of the Ottoman Empire. The political and social evolution of many of these immigrant communities (Tatars as well as many others), as we will see, are crucial to understanding both the nature and the perceptions of organized crime up to the present...

The arrival of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus in the hundreds of thousands served to radically change the demographic complexion of what remained of the Ottoman Empire [19th century] ... Virtually all of these newcomers arrived with no possessions or any means to carry on their former livelihoods... It did not take long for many newcomers to garner a reputation for lawlessness, banditry, and violence.

As one pages through official reports or even newspaper clippings from the turn of the twentieth century, it appears that certain ethnicities acquired a particularly acute reputation for criminal behavior. It is difficult to find examples of provincial banditry without running across the names of men specifically identified by their ethnic background. In the absence of a paternal name, using ethnic epithets did serve as a proper way of distinguishing a Muslim man’s identity (for example, Arnavut Mehmet, Mehmet the Albanian or Çerkes Ahmet, Ahmet the Circassian)... A last ethnic group that became especially associated with banditry in the late Ottoman Empire was the Laz. The Laz, a predominantly Muslim group closely related to the Mingrelian branch of the Georgian peoples, possess a long history of labor migration within the context of the Ottoman Empire...

As mentioned earlier, elements of the CUP state (that is, members found in both the military and the bureaucracy) came to see the use of Muslim gangs as an effective tactic in their war against Orthodox Christian separatists in Macedonia. Although bandits could be found within the ranks or at the head of gendarmerie outfits throughout the empire, the outright mobilization or appropriation of çeteci seems to have been an ad hoc strategy largely localized to the Ottoman Balkans before 1912. The outcome of the first Balkan war, however, seems to prompted a change in approach among some Young Turk strategists. In the wake of the Bulgarian occupation of Western Thrace, a cabal of CUP commanders, led by the hero of the Young Turk Revolution, Enver Pasha, drew together a small host of junior officers in a clandestine attempt to reassert Ottoman control over this strategically vital region. Dubbed the Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), this paramilitary unit, it was hoped, would provide a vanguard for Muslim resistance to the Bulgarian occupation. Aside from a few engagements and scattered propaganda efforts, the Special Organization ultimately failed to preempt the loss of Western Thrace.

Nevertheless, an important precedent was established with the creation of the Special Organization. Rather than a regional tactic meant to amplify local counterinsurgency efforts, the deployment of a unified body of paramilitaries would allow the central government to take the fight to provincial guerrillas and dissidents without involving regular elements of the Ottoman security establishment [which later led to the 'alleged' Armenian Genocide]...

It is abundantly clear that officials and officers in the service of the Ottoman Empire were greatly concerned with the threats posed by bandits lurking in the countryside. But for all of the steps taken by the imperial government to minimize the supposed root causes of brigandage, it is also clear that Muslim bandits were not viewed as the sole or perhaps most paramount threats to the absolute security and existence of the state... As Istanbul lurched towards the outbreak of world war in 1914, the CUP government reasoned that the prospect of future revolts among Anatolia’s Christian populations (namely Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians) could not be countered reflexively or passively. Aggressive, proactive steps had to be taken in order to stave off the kind of disaster that befell Ottoman Macedonia. Assuring the survival of the empire, in other words, meant eradicating these potentially disloyal segments of the Ottoman population before they took up arms. 61 In prosecuting such a bloody, and ostensibly illegal, stroke of action, elements of the CUP government recruited and utilized gangs and bandits as effective, but disposable, instruments of state violence...

The declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 did not lead to an official change in policy towards immigrants with violent or criminal proclivities. Efforts to limit the ability of immigrants to congregate together in densely packed communities were reinitiated immediately... Several scholars have correctly cited such steps as manifestations of Ankara’s unwavering commitment to nationalize and “Turkicize” Anatolia’s diverse population. Indeed, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), as well as many of his supporters and retainers, argued with great vigor that it was essential to stamp out any variance in identity other than Turkish nationalism. Yet, in considering the Ottoman roots of Kemalism, one could argue that Ankara’s drive towards “Turkification” also served, at least in the minds of Turkish officials, a more practical purpose. Singling out Albanians, Circassians, and Laz (as well as, to different degrees, Kurds, Bosnians, Cypriots, Cretans, Arabs, Armenians, and Greeks) as suspect groups helped to ensure the physical security of the state... In the wake of Mustafa Kemal’s rise to power, official organs of the Turkish government would eventually abandon even the use of minority terms or epithets (such as Laz, Albanian, or Kurd) with respect to the population... Nevertheless, behind closed doors, Turkish officials in the post-Ottoman era continued to view crime in part through the prism of ethnicity...

In surveying both the documentary evidence and the testimony and news reporting from this era, there is one aspect of counter-narcotics politics and policing in the Menderes era that remains somewhat elusive. According to contemporary sources, drug interdiction efforts undertaken by Aygün and the DPS may have similarly provided a vehicle for a more generalized pattern of domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Moreover, particularly in the wake of his indictment by the military regime in 1960, there is some evidence that suggests that Kemal Aygün and the Democratic Party may have tapped the Turkish underworld to fill the ranks of privately armed gangs or paramilitary squads. While it is difficult to completely validate these latter claims, such a direct alliance formed between the ​Democratic Party and the urban thugs would have been in keeping with early trends from the late Ottoman and early Republican periods...

The failing political fortunes of Turkey’s more notorious gangsters has not impeded the illicit trafficking that helped to bring the Turkish underworld to life. Like many other countries since the end of the Cold War, narcotics trafficking in and out of Turkey has grown more diverse and ever-more lucrative. Continued illicit opium cultivation in Afghanistan, despite a brief dip in the late 1990s, remains a staple base for morphine and heroin production smuggled through Turkey. A vibrant “Balkan route” connecting Turkish wholesalers to retailers in Europe and elsewhere endures as a central conduit for heroin...

Months before the 1980 coup, the Interior Ministry created a special department (the Ministry’s Department of Smuggling, or Kaçakçılık Daire Başbakanlığı) responsible for overseeing law enforcement issues (including intelligence) related to smuggling. The office further expanded in 1995..

At [around 2000] Sami Hoştan had become a household name in Turkey. Born in the Macedonian capital of Skopje in 1947, he arrived in Turkey at the age of seven and settled in the city of Istanbul (where he acquired the nickname Arnavut Sami, or Sami the Albanian). Over the course of his life he spent much of his time working in Europe, primarily in the Netherlands. By the 1990s he had earned a reputation as a major investor and partner in several casinos in Istanbul as well as the Netherlands. His involvement in gambling, according to prosecutors in both Western Europe and Turkey, served to mask his involvement in the narcotics trade. In 1992, he was accused of smuggling close to 300 kilos of heroin into Holland and Germany...

Although never convicted of any wrongdoing as a result of the scandal, government prosecutors have long maintained Arnavut Sami was one of a large cast of gangsters, politicians, and security personnel who helped to form a series of state-backed gangs (çetes) deployed against the PKK...

The first indication of the complex and twisted web tying individuals... to the Susurluk scandal came as a direct result of the car crash that killed Abdullah Çatlı in November 1996 [others in the car were a police chief, head of a Kurdish tribe from the region of Urfa who was also an MP]... The plot thickened when press reports got wind of the presence of both weapons and official passports bearing Çatlı’s pictures and assumed aliases. The passports, which were reserved for special state employees, had been signed personally by the Minister of the Interior, Mehmet Ağar, a one time high-ranking DPS official who had recently been appointed to the Interior Ministry... Mehmet Ağar did stand trial in September 2011 and was found guilty of forming a criminal gang (even though this gang has never been implicated officially in any crime)...

Sedat Peker, who took the stand in the fall of 2011, was far more forthcoming in explaining his past dealings with high-ranking political officials and their connections to both Susurluk and Ergenekon. Before the court, Peker claimed to have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the milieu that organized and executed the murders of several individuals in the 1990s. In his testimony .. he claimed that an agent from MİT, Korkut Eken, had ordered and helped finance the killings of Kurdish businessmen with links to the PKK...

Turkish deep state’s imperial roots [is correct]. The power of the ayan (and their bandit retainers), as well as the CUP’s mobilization of provincial çetes, resembles contemporary state-criminal alliances similar to those seen in the wake of the Susurluk scandal. Ankara’s recent need to recruit members of Turkey’s underworld for service against ASALA and the PKK resonate strongly in the assistance rendered by kidnappers, brigands, and killers as frontline troops and policemen (in the case of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries) or clandestine assassins and storm troopers (as in the çetes of the Special Organization). A select number of outlaws in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey have benefited from such patronage, resulting in the marginalization of competing criminal interests and the entrenchment of illicit syndicates within the provincial and national political system (particularly in times of crisis).