Monday, August 17, 2015

Turkey risks relapse into ’90s violence

By Aykan Erdmir


The country is vulnerable to intercommunal tension and attacks from abroad.

A specter is haunting Turkey. Suicide bombers, assassins and an alphabet soup of terrorist organizations seem to have brought back the carnage of the 1990s. The rapid escalation of violence of the last three weeks may be puzzling for Turkey’s younger generations. For those of us who lived through the 1990s, however, it is eerily familiar.
The 1990s recall memories of Turkey’s dirty war. My generation’s everyday routine was punctuated by gruesome breaking news: the bombing of pro-Kurdish newspapers; 35 people burned alive at an Alevi religious festival; massacres by Kurdish PKK terrorists; the discovery of underground cells where radical Islamists hogtied victims to suffer a slow and painful death.
More traumatic still was the revelation that certain elements of the Turkish state were either complicit or indifferent to these crimes. During those years, Turkey painfully learned how quickly the country could be drawn into lawlessness and a culture of impunity. The backdrop of violence provides ample opportunities for vigilantes to settle intercommunal scores.
For those who remember the 1990s, it was therefore no surprise to witness two separate gun attacks targeting leaders of the minority Alevi faith in the same week. Or to learn that, earlier last month, a 20-year old ISIL suicide bomber massacred 33 volunteers at a socialist youth camp near the Syrian border, and that the PKK youth wing retaliated by killing a suspected ISIL member in Istanbul. In a country where almost 12 million young people are neither at work nor in school, youth radicalization is a recipe for disaster.
Sectarianism is on the rise, and ISIL can find fertile recruiting ground not only among Turkey’s radical Sunnis but also its 1.9 million Syrian refugees.
The Turkish state has never functioned well under such pressure. Recently leaked footage reminiscent of the 1990s showed Turkish special forces abusing Kurds while shouting, “We’ll show you the power of the Turk!” Many pundits justifiably fear a return to the repressive measures of those years, which included the imposition of a 15-year-long state of emergency in 13 provinces and bans on opposition media, politicians and political parties.
This time, Turkey is threatened by a different kind of violence. The brutal suppression of the 2013 Gezi Park protests underlined the government’s intolerance of non-violent dissent. The current economic slowdown and its excessive dependence on foreign capital has made the government financially vulnerable. Turkey’s fragile democracy and unstable economy could make the imminent crises even more damaging than those of the 1990s.
Increasingly isolated in foreign policy, Turkey also has to deal with a plethora of non-state threats. Ankara’s assertive Middle East policy has engrained extremism in its societal fabric. Sectarianism is on the rise, and ISIL can find fertile recruiting ground not only among Turkey’s radical Sunnis but also its 1.9 million Syrian refugees. The porous nature of the border with Syria exposes Turkey to intercommunal tension and attacks from outside the country.


Conspiracy theories

The 13-year rule of the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has taken a heavy toll. Although the AKP’s first five years in office were marked with reforms enhancing minority rights in accordance with European Union norms, pro-government media continued to circulate conspiracy theories and inculcate hate and prejudice towards the minorities. This has created an atmosphere that is as polarized as it was in the 1990s.
Last week, the governor of Istanbul delivered the eulogy at the funeral of a police chief slain by a radical Marxist group. His remarks show the alarming level of delusion at the upper echelons of Turkey’s ruling elite: Speaking to an audience including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and ex-president Abdullah Gül, the governor claimed, “No mastermind can prevent the continuity of our state and the prospects of our nation.”
Mastermind was a “documentary” broadcast this spring on an AKP-linked channel that offered a jumbled assortment of conspiracy theories on supposed Jewish domination of the Turkish republic, so the governor’s assertion was part of the prevailing anti-Semitic paranoia.
Government incitement has a way of infiltrating into popular consciousness. Last Tuesday, a columnist for a government mouthpiece accused the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party of being “the pawn of the crusader-Zionist alliance” fighting against “independent Muslim Turkey.” More recently, a professor at a prestigious university advocated the killing one HDP deputy in retaliation for each victim of the PKK. His call for violence was received with approval and an online solidarity campaign.
Unless the Turkish government and its die-hard supporters manage to step back from the rhetorical brink, they will be responsible for pushing the country into a spiral of violence that will make the 1990s look tame by comparison.

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