Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

214 • GRAY WOLVESParty, (NAP), a secular Pan-Turkist party of the extreme right wing ofTurkish politics. Originally a student group organized in the late 1960sto oppose Marxist-Leninist students in Turkey’s universities, once theGray Wolves were put under the direction of NAP leader Colonel AlparslanTürkes (1917–1997) in 1976 they turned into a right-wing deathsquad. By 1980 the group was reputed to have committed 694 politicalmurders. In May 1981 the NAP was outlawed but was reconstituted in1983 under a new name, the Nationalist Task Force; in 1992 it resumedits original name. Since Türkes became deputy prime minister in a latercoalition government that included the NAP, the Gray Wolves may beregarded as having been a quasi-state-sponsored repressive group. Accordingto Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladioand Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), GrayWolves arrested after the 1981 crackdown were released if they wouldagree to fight members of the ethnonationalist groups the KurdistanWorkers’ Party and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation ofArmenia (ASALA).Türkes ran two commando-style training camps outside Ankaraand Izmir for the Gray Wolves. The group also proselytized youngerexpatriate workers living in Western European nations. Before beingrecruited by the Bulgarian secret police, Mehmet Ali Agca had oncebeen a Gray Wolf member and had murdered a leftist Turkish newspapereditor, Abdi Ipekci, prior to his attempt to kill Pope John PaulII on 13 May 1981. With the imposition of military rule in Turkey inSeptember 1980, the terrorist activities of the Gray Wolves were constrainedwith the crackdown on all paramilitary and political groupsthat followed. The group was estimated to have had about 26,000members in about 80 branches, although Ganser claimed that theyhad as many as 200,000 members in about 1,700 branches.In 1992 Alparslan Türkes visited the newly independent Republicof Azerbaijan to help promote the election of Abulfaz Elchibey,also a Pan-Turkish nationalist, who became Azerbaijan’s first non-Communist president but who was overthrown in a coup in June1993. After the death of Türkes in 1997, the NAP purged the moreviolent members of the Gray Wolves so that the party could adopt amore moderate form of nationalism compatible with contemporaryEuropean norms. In 2004 the Gray Wolves were blamed for preventingthe showing in Turkey of Ararat, Atom Egoyan’s film about theArmenian genocide.