No effort to end village guards-minister

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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Speaking to journalists at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport on Saturday, Atalay said he found some remarks calling for the abolition of the village guard system a bit too excessive.

He said he found it wrong to link the murder of 44 people in the village of Bilge in the southeastern province of Mardin last Monday with the village guard system because the suspected attackers and the victims were members of it, according to Anatolia news agency. "Ten people were arrested after the shootings and another was arrested later.

Village guards were involved in this crime but the system cannot be blamed for it," he said.The village guard system officially began in 1986 with the recruitment and arming of villagers in the Southeast to take advantage of their knowledge of the local terrain in the fight against terror. In the years following, there has been criticism that the guards are becoming a law unto their own.