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Who's Behind The Assassination Of Three Kurdish Women In The Heart O

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  • Who's Behind The Assassination Of Three Kurdish Women In The Heart O

    WHO'S BEHIND THE ASSASSINATION OF THREE KURDISH WOMEN IN THE HEART OF THE FRENCH CAPITAL?

    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/11/paris_murder_mystery?page=full

    Paris Murder Mystery

    BY ERIC PAPE | JANUARY 11, 2013

    PARIS - At first, it sounded like a horror story torn from the pages
    of American tabloids: the corpses of three women were found on the
    second floor office of an apartment building on Jan. 10. Two of the
    women had bullets holes in the back of their heads, the third was
    shot in the stomach and the forehead.

    But this was here, in Paris, and just down the street from La Gare Du
    Nord, the city's main train station. Multiple murders don't happen
    often in the French capital. Guns, while very gradually becoming
    more common in parts of France, are rarely used by anyone other than
    authorities. Sometimes though, they are used by hit-men, terrorists,
    or hit-men hired by terrorists.

    So when suited men pushed a bright blue gurney holding a small,
    limp corpse past journalists and passersby in the working class 10th
    arrondissement on Thursday afternoon, it brought home how different
    gun violence is here. This wasn't a random crime, a brutal robbery,
    a mentally ill person, or someone bullied until they retaliated,
    aided by easy access to guns. This was, as French authorities quickly
    recognized, a triple execution, almost certainly by a professional
    killer, apparently using a silencer. The triple murder was so discreet
    that in a multi-floor building, no one noticed when it happened. The
    women were, police believe, killed at around 3 p.m. on January 9,
    but their bodies were not found until after midnight.

    Over the next 24 hours, French authorities -- including its
    anti-terror brigade -- quickly pieced together the key elements of
    what happened. Their ongoing investigation highlights the international
    political intrigue and the broader stakes surrounding this attack. Two
    of the three women were prominent members of France's large Kurdish
    immigrant community, 90 percent of whom come from Turkey, and the
    executions took place just as the Turkish media were reporting that
    Ankara and the militant Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) had come to
    an agreement aimed at ending nearly the three decades of violence
    that have claimed as many as 45,000 lives. The PKK is designated a
    terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, France and the
    European Union.

    One of those killed was Sakine Cansiz, 55, a well-respected figure in
    the Kurdish exile community and, Turkish authorities say, a founding
    member of the PKK. Some Kurds in Paris believed her to be close to
    Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is currently serving a
    life sentence in Turkey. Ocalan, who has apparently softened his
    attitudes on violence since his arrest, is apparently leading the
    peace talks with the Turkish government from his jail cell. Those
    talks are said to aim for a step-by-step cessation of hostilities:
    the PKK is to stop its attacks in March and, soon after, the Turkish
    state will restore the rights of its Kurdish minority, as well as
    satisfy some other grievances. It is unclear how the triple murder
    might affect those negotiations.

    A second victim was Fidan Dogan, 32, who ran the Kurdish information
    center where the bodies were found. She was a representative of the
    Kurdistan National Congress, which is a Brussels-based coalition
    of supportive organizations across Europe. The third victim, Leyla
    Soylemez, is described as a recently arrived twenty-something Kurdish
    activist. She may well have been in the wrong place, with the wrong
    people, at the wrong time. Various friends and colleagues told French
    media that Dogan and Cansiz were aware enough of the dangers they faced
    in the one-bedroom apartment that acted as the unmarked office for
    the information center that they made sure to never be alone there,
    but that may have merely meant a larger death toll when one or both
    of them were targeted.

    Shock over the executions has been sharp. Almost immediately after the
    discovery of the bodies late at night by friends and colleagues --
    who suspected something was up when they noticed the lights were on
    in the office but the women weren't answering their phones -- word
    spread quickly through the city's Kurdish community. By morning on
    Thursday, hundreds of Kurds had gathered outside, in front of quickly
    installed police barricades. One of the many protest signs said:
    "We are all PKK!" Another read: "Turkey the assassin, [President]
    Hollande the accomplice!" Others called for a political solution to
    the Kurdistan problem. Many protesters, some with tears in their eyes,
    waved Kurdish flags.

    The executions almost immediately unleashed a flurry of conspiracy
    theories in the crowd, including some on fresh-made protest signs,
    as to who was behind them. Suspects include the Turkish intelligence,
    a right-wing nationalist fringe grouping in Turkey called the "Gray
    Wolves," and Iranian or Syrian authorities who want to destabilize
    Turkey for being close to the West, the United States, and the French
    government.

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn't take long to offer
    his own theory. He told journalists on Jan. 11 that the murders were
    likely the result of an internal battle within the PKK. His thin
    evidence: the killer or killers had gotten into a building with a
    security door code, and had somehow managed to get into the office
    without breaking down the door. He also suggested that the killings
    could have been the work of outside actors looking to sabotage the
    peace negotiations.

    His opinions are unlikely to carry much weight with Kurdish exiles
    whose feelings of destabilization are very real. An unidentified young
    man at the protest on Rue Lafayette summarized the sense of fury,
    and vulnerability, that the killings instilled in the Kurdish exile
    community. "Most of the people who are here have endured repression in
    Turkey. Most are political refugees who came to France, and found that
    here, too, the repression continues. There are massacres here, too.

    There is a feeling of anger, of being fed up."

    Those who question the interest of French authorities -- who
    have repeatedly investigated allegations of extortion of Kurdish
    businesses with a "revolutionary tax" -- in pursuing justice in this
    murder investigation could take heart from comments that same day
    by President Francois Hollande. He declared that he was personally
    affected by the attack, as he knew one of the victims who "regularly
    came to meet" him and other political figures.

    But the French president has a very full plate at the moment. In
    addition to trying to restore the stagnant French economy, keep the
    euro afloat, and invert the curb on inflation that is approaching
    11 percent, Hollande gave the green light on Friday for French
    troops to take part in a military intervention in Mali. Since
    Hollande's inauguration in May, Kurdish concerns have hardly been a
    pressing issue, and it is no surprise that he wants to wait for the
    investigation to advance before commenting further.

    Kurds do have decades-old links to Hollande's Socialist party. A large
    wave of Kurdish immigrants came to France for economic reasons in the
    1960s and 1970s, but those who followed in the 1980s tended to be
    more politically inclined activists. And they managed to convince
    then-President Francois Mitterrand's wife, Danielle, to raise
    awareness about the hardships and discrimination that they faced in
    Turkey and in parts of the Middle East. (Interestingly, when Iraqi
    Kurds finagled an essentially autonomous region out of the U.S.-led
    invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, it took the wind out of some
    of their support in Europe.)

    Given the many big issues weighing on Hollande, Kurdish exiles in
    search of justice for the Paris murders might do well to stir a dead
    woman's personal link to the French president, to keep him focused
    on their lost comrades.

    How any of this will affect the negotiations between the imprisoned
    Kurdish leader and Ankara, and what it means for the future of the
    Turkish Kurds, remains an open question. As is the mystery of who's
    responsible for three new corpses in Paris.

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