Arif Doğan (born Kırıkhan,

Hatay Province Hatay Province (, ) is the southernmost province and metropolitan municipality of Turkey. Its area is , and its population is 1,686,043 (2022). It is situated mostly outside Anatolia, along the eastern coast of the Levantine Sea. The province ...

, 1945 – 17 October 2014) was a commander in the

Turkish Gendarmerie The Gendarmerie General Command () is the national gendarmerie force of the Republic of Turkey. It is a service branch of the Turkish Ministry of Interior responsible for the maintenance of the public order in areas that fall outside the jurisdi ...

, and said to be one of the founders of the Gendarmerie's JITEM intelligence unit. He was a defendant in the

Ergenekon trials The Ergenekon trials or the Ergenekon conspiracy, were a series of high-profile trials which took place in 2008–2016 in Turkey in which 275 people, including military officers, journalists and opposition lawmakers, all alleged members of Erge ...

, and in August 2013 was sentenced to 47 years in prison. He has stated in court that he founded JITEM in the late 1980s on the orders of Gendarmerie Commander Gen. Burhanettin Bigalı, with the approval of the Chief of Staff ( Necip Torumtay) and of the Interior Ministry, and transferred control to Veli Küçük in 1990. He had previously claimed to have founded JITEM on his own initiative, and to have "frozen" it in 1990. In 2010 a voice recording said to be of Doğan was anonymously posted online, in which Doğan said he had ordered the deaths of Eşref Bitlis and Cem Ersever, referring to the death of Bitlis (in a suspicious plane crash) as an "assassination". JITEM informant Abdülkadir Aygan said that this was true. Doğan said that the voice in the recording was his, but said the recordings had been spliced to incriminate him. On 17 January 2011 Doğan, while testifying in court in the Ergenekon case, declared that he set up Kurdish Hizbollah as a contra group to fight and kill militants of the

Kurdistan Workers' Party The Kurdistan Workers' Party, or the PKK, isDespite the PKK's 12th Congress announcing plans for total organisational dissolution, the PKK has not yet been dissolved de facto or de jure. a Kurds, Kurdish militant political organization and armed ...

(PKK). The organization was originally to be called ''Hizbul-Kontr'' ("Party of the Contras").

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dogan, Arif 1945 births 2014 deaths Turkish Army officers Turkish Gendarmerie personnel People from Kırıkhan JİTEM personnel People convicted in the Ergenekon trials