Grey Wolves

The Grey Wolves were the youth wing of the Milliyetci Hareket Partisi (MHP), a neo-fascist political party in Turkey. Fighting between the Grey Wolves and leftists during the late 1970s resulted in more than 5,000 deaths.

The Milliyetci Hareket Partisi (Nationalist Action Party or Nationalist Movement Party) was founded in 1969 by Alpasan Türkes, a Turkish military officer and ardent supporter of pan-Turkism, the idea that all Turkic-speaking peoples should be united under one political regime. Many observers compare the MHP's structure, ideology, and tactics to those of Europe's fascist regimes of the 1930s. The Grey Wolves were composed of young Turkish men, often students or rural migrants to Turkey's largest cities: Istanbul and Ankara, the capital. The organization was run on military lines, with followers undergoing training in the martial arts and the use of various weapons and explosives. Members were fed and clothed by the MHP; the party's willingness to provide for them combined with the thorough political indoctrination they received often inspired a blind devotion to the party. By the end of the 1970s, the group had tens of thousands of members.

Throughout the 1970s, Türkes had held a series of high governmental positions, including the post of minister of monopolies and customs. Türkes's control of the customs department led to a profitable association between the MHP and Turkey's vast array of smugglers and drug traffickers. Türkes's position also allowed the MHP to obtain whatever weapons it needed.

As the decade progressed, Turkey's leftist groups became more politically active, and political violence worsened; the MHP, which was fanatically anti-communist, began to deploy the Grey Wolves in earnest. They are alleged to have been behind a May 1977 massacre at a leftist parade that killed more than 20 people and injured hundreds. In 1978, a leftist government headed by Bulent Ecevit came to power in Turkey and violence worsened. The Grey Wolves were used to attack leftist political party headquarters, and gangs of Grey Wolves were sent into the countryside to incite riots. A December 1978 attack in the southeastern town of Kahramanmaras was typical: a bomb set off in a movie house led to several days of rioting and gun battles in the streets between the Grey Wolves and the leftists. Two hundred people were killed with more than 1,000 wounded, and more than 900 buildings destroyed. By the end of the decade, the country was near anarchy.

In September 1980, the military overthrew Turkey's government in a bloodless coup. Türkes and several dozen high-level MHP members were arrested, and the Grey Wolves reined in. Although many MHP members, including Türkes, were convicted and given stiff sentences, most served no time in prison, having been released at the conclusion of the trial. Türkes resumed his political career.

[Page 154]The Grey Wolves continued on the path of violence. A former Grey Wolf member tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981; neither his motivation nor possible state sponsorship of the assassination attempt were ever fully clarified. The Grey Wolves were linked to an attempted assassination of the Turkish prime minister in 1988 and to a series of ethnic killings in Turkey in the early 1990s. The Grey Wolves have been accused of inciting violence within Cypriot, German, and English Turkish expatriate communities during the 1990s.

The extent of the Turkish government's connection to and sanctioning of the Grey Wolves' activities remains unclear, although rumors abound. In 1999, a resurgent MHP (with a new, pro-Islam stance) gained 18 percent of the vote in the Turkish parliamentary elections, winning a place in a coalition government.

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