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July 28, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
has also led to the seizure of around 965 compa- nies with assets of roughly TRY 41bn ($11.3bn).
The Istanbul trial of 17 journalists accused by Turkish prosecutors of targeting Erdogan through “asymmetric war methods” on behalf of the Gulenist movement Ankara says was behind
the attempt to overthrow the government got
Ukrainian farmers turn to Donbas veterans for protection from raiders
Trybinienko says raiders seized his 500 ha farm in May, after he discovered the state corporate registry had been modified using a forged signature, making the company officially no longer his. When he tried to get it back with the help of locals, a violent clash occurred, injuring at least three people. Local media reported that pistols and hunting rifles were seized by the police at the site.
Raiding has been a constant issue since the country’s independence in 1992: weak rule of law as well as corrupt police and judges have made it easy for criminals to illegally change ownership of a firm before forcibly seizing it. Middle-sized farms such as Trybinienko’s, both big enough to have assets worth stealing and small enough to lack protection, are an ideal target.
Anti-raiding Task Force
But if raiding isn’t new, the involvement of veterans from the conflict in the East definitely is.
At the farm, about 30 men in military trousers and black T-shirts sporting the words “Donbas” and “Aidar” (another former volunteer battalion) move around the building, some listening to Trybinienko’s description of the latest raiding attempt, others
under way on July 24. The trial of reporters, editors, columnists and cartoonists from the secularist Cumhuriyet newspaper has become a symbol of the destruction of press freedom in Turkey.
Turkey’s state of emergency was extended by another three months on July 18.
bringing mattresses inside the office. They plan to stay here tonight, they say, to make sure the raiders don’t come back.
The atmosphere is tense but excited, with dozens of locals mixing with the Donbas and Aidar members. Further away, a small group of police officers is quietly watching, apparently careful not to get too close. To newcomers, Donbas and Aidar members are keen to show they are unarmed.
Raiding cases are often murky, with accusations thrown out by both sides and guilty parties hard to establish with certainty: at the end of May, a local businessman set up a press conference to claim he was the “legitimate owner” of the farm, and that Trybinienko was trying to walk back on a done deal.
In this context, the presence of controversial nationalist groups openly hostile to the current authorities adds another layer of complexity to the story. The legal grounds on which these groups can provide protection to farmers remain, for example, unclear.
In Berezhinka, they came at Yuri Krutko’s request. Almost a year ago, this farmer from the Kirovo- grad region set up an organisation, first called
the “Cowboys of Kirovograd” but since renamed “Agrarian Self Defence of Ukraine”, to create “task forces” of veterans who could repel raiding at- tempts. So far, Donbas members and other vet- erans helped repel three attacks against farmers, Krutko says, while the organisation provided legal help to several others.