Turkey: Well-Known Actor Faces War Crimes Charges after Talk-Show Confession

A well-known actor risks being the first Turk to face war crimes charges after an Istanbul prosecutor opened an investigation recently into his admission that he killed a Greek Cypriot prisoner of war during Turkey's 1974 invasion of Cyprus.

"The commander told me to kill on his orders", Atilla Olgac, 64, who plays the scar-faced Mafioso named Sword on the hugely popular television series Valley of the Wolves, said during an interview broadcast on a Turkish morning television program January 22.

"The first kid I shot was a 19 year old prisoner. His hands were tied. When I pointed my gun at his head, he spat in my face. I shot him in the forehead."

Speaking on January 28, Istanbul prosecutor Ali Cakir said he would conduct an investigation in a possible violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, to which Turkey is party. Should evidence of wrongdoing emerge, the dossier will be sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Cakir said.

Olgac confirmed his story in an interview with the Turkish daily Radikal, describing how his commander had ordered him to shoot the prisoner after he refused to talk. He said he couldn't remember the name of the commander.

Amid growing scandal in Cyprus and Turkey, he then retracted, insisting his words were a "scenario" and that he had been testing public reaction to a film script he was writing. He was unavailable on January 30 for comment.

If his latest claim is true, he got more than he bargained for. Punning on the name of his screen character, Turkish nationalist newspapers branded him a "tactless wolf," and accused him of dirtying his country's name on the international stage.

With the prestige of Turkey's influential military at risk, the staunchly pro-state daily Hurriyet even wheeled out 'witnesses' who claimed Olgac was a coward that officers had relegated to peeling potatoes as soon as he arrived on the island.

Even at Hurriyet offices, though, not everybody was convinced by such efforts to play down Olgac's claims. "If he didn't invent everything to draw attention to himself, then Mr. Olgac has committed a war crime," Mehmet Yilmaz, one of the daily's columnists, wrote on January 23. Pointing out that there is no time limitation for war crime convictions, Yilmaz added that "Olgac could well find himself in jail."

As a spokesman for the Peace Initiative, an NGO fighting for justice for the families of hundreds who disappeared during Turkey's war against Kurdish separatists, Hakan Tahmaz thinks Olgac's role in a TV series that presents state-employed killers as heroes blinded him to Turkey's changes. "Five years ago, I doubt any newspapers would have picked his comments up," Tahmaz says. "But Turkish society has become much more sensitive to this sort of issue since then."

On January 30, a spokesman for Turkey's army announced that it too was opening an investigation into Olgac.

But the stir Olgac has caused in his own country is nothing compared to reactions on Cyprus, where his words continue to make headlines. On January 27, Cyprus filed a case against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights calling on that judicial body to clarify the fate of citizens who disappeared during Turkish military operations in 1974. "Turkey must cooperate to determine under what conditions people disappeared; this is something Turkey has not done," Cypriot government spokesman Stephanos Stephanou said.

Olgac's confession comes amid renewed talks between Turkish and Greek Cypriots aimed at reuniting the island, which has been divided along ethnic lines since 1974. Failure to reach an agreement before the end of the year could spell the end for Turkey's European Union accession hopes.

Analysts doubt that the Olgac scandal will undermine talks. But there are concerns that it could impact one of the most striking symbols of growing cooperation between Cypriot Greeks and Turks - a landmark bi-communal initiative that has been exhuming and identifying Cypriot dead since August 2006.

Around 1,500 Greek Cypriots and 500 Turkish Cypriots vanished between the start of inter-ethnic tensions in the 1960s and the end of Turkish operations in 1974. Since 2006, the UN-backed Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) has exhumed more than 450 bodies. Of that total, 110 have been identified - 78 Greeks and 32 Turks.

"The program is a victory of scientific collaboration over politics," says Elias Georgiades, who heads the Greek Cypriot half of the 40-person team. "But we depend on information, a lot of which can only come from Turks who fought on Cyprus in 1974. My fear is that angry reactions [to Atilla Olgac] will not encourage others like him to come forward and talk."

For Ahmet Erdengiz, director general of the Turkish Cypriot Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a senior member of CMP, the Olgac affair is "a gift" for ultra-nationalists on both sides of the divided island. "These people have always been opposed to our project", he says. "Now, and particularly since the Greek side took Turkey to the ECHR on [January 27], they have been going from village coffee house to village coffee house saying 'we told you so, give information and you could face jail.'"

Mr Georgiades says he hopes to accompany Turkish Cypriot colleagues to Turkey to try and persuade Atilla Olgac to provide more detailed information about what he witnessed in 1974. Andreas Paraskos, a leading Greek Cypriot journalist who has followed the search for missing people closely for over a decade, expressed hope the actor would agree to talk. "Roughly 300 19-year-olds went missing in 1974," he says. "For the past week, 300 families have been wondering whether it was their son Mr. Olgac shot. If this helps just one family find their son's body - that is good."