The ‘deep state’ meets Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’. The country’s resulting predicament is much more dangerous than two decades ago.
Hrant Dink..Adalet ( justice!) 8 years on, the government has failed to bring those responsible to justice. Demotix/J Kojak.One suicide bombing after another, Turkey’s public is growing accustomed to images of carnage that no longer originate from Syria or Iraq, but from their own capital. The twin blasts that killed at least 102 people at a peace rally in Ankara on 10 October follow a string of deadly explosions in Suruç in July and Diyarbakır in June, and claim the unenviable title of being Turkey’s deadliest terror attack from the Reyhanlı bombings of May 2013. The astonishing series of intelligence and security failures has cast in a critical spotlight the state’s ability or willingness to safeguard those citizens whom the government views as a threat to its rule.
Many Turks living in Belgium have received postal mail from the AK Party of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, inviting them to vote in the 1 November election, offering benefits in exchange.
The current mayhem, if it continues, is likely to once again tempt the military top brass to stage a coup and take power in the name of restoring order as it has done several times earlier.
State funeral of colonel killed in combat with PKK, October 18. Demotix/Piero Castellano. All rights reserved. The twin bombings on October 10 at the Ankara Railway Station that left one hundred people dead were just the latest in a series of terrorist attacks that Turkey has suffered from recently. In addition, the civil war between the Kurdish PKK and the Turkish state has been renewed after a lapse of two years thus further adding to the mayhem, especially in the predominantly Kurdish populated areas in southeastern Turkey.
A different kind of reality is both constructed and deployed, which effects a huge gulf in understanding between the pro-AKP and non-AKP masses.
Turkey issued a total media ban over Ankara bombings. Demotix/Sahan Nuhoglu. All rights resrved.The Ankara massacre that killed 102 people, many of whom are our friends, affected our lives as adversely as anything we have seen for a long time – but not exactly for everyone. Such slogans as “it’s time to re-unite,” or “we need unity and solidarity today” on the part of the AKP deputies and authorities (Justice and Development Party) no longer mean anything, even if we take them to be the mainly empty gestures that they are. They are unreal, because there is no unity in Turkey.
