Turkey: I Am But a Simple Murderer

Southeastern Turkey is the badlands of Asia Minor—a forbidding, sparsely populated region of parched plains and spiny, 10,000-ft. mountains, of swirling dust and barely passable roads. It is an inhospitable land to everybody except bandits and smugglers. For more than a decade, the most notorious bandit in the area has been Mehmet Ihsan Kilit, known throughout Turkey simply as “Kocero.” He usually looked like a walking arsenal, with bandoleers of cartridges over his chest, binoculars dangling from his neck, a rifle slung over his shoulder, and a hunting knife or a revolver seemingly glued to his hand. He was believed to have killed at least half a dozen men.

$20,000 Haul. Son of a Kurdish mother and a Turkish father who belonged to the nomadic Kocerli tribe (hence the nickname), Kocero was born 38 years ago in a tiny, ten-house village. For a while he was poor but straight, but in 1950 he killed his brother-in-law in an “affair of honor,” stole more than $250 in lire and gold coins and fled for the hills. From then on, Kocero virtually ruled what few roads there were in the southeast. In a single day, he and his band of five or six men looted 200 people by halting one bus after another on a main highway, made off with nearly $20,000. As a sideline, he got fat fees for guiding smugglers of opium, cattle, coffee, silks and jewelry across the Turkish-Syrian border.

In the confusion that followed Turkey’s 1960 military coup, Kocero kept extending his franchise westward, and the government began organizing huge hunting parties to track him down. “Why this display of government forces, army, gendarmery, police?” he once complained. “After all, I am but a simple murderer.”

Then Betrayal. The simple murderer proved a difficult man to catch, and Interior Minister Sahir Kurutluoglu came under such intense criticism for failing to do so that he went personally to the southeast, summoned provincial governors, army commanders and police officers to a meeting to chart plans for trapping Kocero. At the moment the meeting was being held, the bandit was nonchalantly holding up eleven autos and buses a scant eight miles away. The laughingstock of Turkey, Kurutluoglu resigned soon afterward.

It took a betrayal to finish Kocero. Early this month he seized a night watchman at a petroleum company camp near the town of Sürt and demanded his help in heisting the camp’s monthly payroll. The guard told Kocero that the payroll was not due until the following night, and swore it on the Koran. When Kocero returned with his men for the robbery the next night, the local gendarmes were waiting for them. During the struggle that followed, Kocero was caught by a shotgun’s blast, but somehow he managed to stagger off badly wounded into the night. Two days later police discovered his body on the bank of a mountain stream two miles away.

Among a people who sing folk songs of their bandits, death is likely to make a hero of Kocero. In the Turkish city of Adana, youngsters have already formed a “Kocero Admirers’ Club.” And despite repeated government statements that he is dead, Kocero lives still for the peasants of southeastern Turkey.