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| Volume IX, June 2002, Number 2 |
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| EXCERPT: The Mystery of Turkish Hizballah |
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| Bulent Aras and Gokhan Bacik |
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Dr. Aras is an associate professor and Mr. Bacik is a lecturer in the department of international relations at Fatih University.
Terrorism cannot be accurately understood as a choice on the part of a handful of people, the material and intellectual authors of violent acts; rather, it must be understood within the multiple social contexts of the broader political system. In the case of the Turkish Hizballah, for example, terrorist activity has been widespread and systematic, involving more than a thousand operations and the killing of hundreds of people. This analysis looks at the way in which certain external Turkish political interests managed to infiltrate Hizballah in an attempt to use it as a pawn in the development of additional undercover operations.
Sudden police raids on Hizballah in January 2000 once again brought the group to the forefront of attention in Turkish politics.2 The raided houses had been occupied by the group's cells. The bodies of dozens of victims were discovered; they had been kidnapped and buried alive after being gruesomely tortured. The group went so far as to make video recordings of the torture as it was carried out. The tapes were confiscated by government security forces but not shown to the public because members of the cabinet forbade their distribution, citing the extreme brutality of the content. Needless to say, therefore, many Turks found it difficult to understand the scenes of hundreds of women in Muslim headscarves shouting support for the Hizballah leader, Huseyin Velioglu, who had ordered the assassinations, after he himself was killed.
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| 2 Hizballah means "the party of God". This concept originally appears in the Quran. Hizb literally means party faction.
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