Problems for Turkey's ruling party as left-wing violence on rise

A resurgence in left-wing violence in Turkey threatens to open up a new front of challenges for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Earlier this month, two armed men believed to be affiliated with the far-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP/C), took a prosecutor, Mehmet Selim Kiraz, hostage for several hours inside a courthouse in Istanbul.

All three were killed in an ensuing shootout with police hours later. However a photo of the assailants pointing a gun at Mr Kiraz’s head prompted the government to shut down Twitter, YouTube and Facebook across the country for a time on April 6th.

The photo pictured a sign that read: “We want Berkin’s killer”, in reference to Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old Kurdish boy who died following a prolonged coma after being hit by a police- fired gas canister when out buying bread in 2013. The prosecutor had been looking into Elvan’s case.

Series of attacks

The courthouse attack is only the latest in a series of increasingly violent acts by left-wing groups. In January, a woman walked into a police station in Istanbul and detonated a bomb, killing herself and a police officer. The same month, a man claiming to act for the DHKP/C was arrested after attempting to throw a grenade at police near the prime minister’s offices, also in Istanbul.

Earlier this month, a woman brandished an assault rifle in front of Istanbul's police headquarters and was shot dead. The woman, Elif Sultan Kalsen (28), was a known member of the DHKP/C.

Although this resurgence of leftist violence has roots going back over two years, when a suicide bomber killed a guard at the American embassy in Ankara in February 2013, communist figures have earned the wrath of the Turkish state since the 1970s.

“We will ask on Berkin’s account” reads graffiti strewn across the backstreets of eastern Istanbul’s Sarigazi, a district home to thousands of leftists, communists and Kurds.

Flags depicting the face of Deniz Gezmis, a founding member of the Marxist-Leninist People’s Liberation Army of Turkey and who was hanged by the authorities in 1972 for a series of bank robberies and abductions of US soldiers, are everywhere.

The DHKP/C, or “Front” as it is simply known in this district, can call on much support here. Clashes between police and local supporters of the DHKP/C have been common in recent months and anger at the possible use of Turkish territory by American troops flying sorties over Syria and Iraq has enraged many.

Despite its six-decade membership of the Nato alliance, Turkey has long been a bastion of anti-American and anti-imperialist sentiment. A Pew poll carried out last year found that only 19 per cent of those polled held a favourable view of the United States.

Last November, anger at the US was plain for all to see when a left-wing group called the Youth Union of Turkey attacked three off-duty American sailors in Istanbul.

Plastic bags

University student Ugur Aytac of the Youth Union, and about 20 others, put plastic bags over the heads of the American sailors, who had disembarked from the USS

Ross

. They escaped their attackers on foot.

Despite this violent act, Aytac says the “attribution of violence to left politics is very bad” and believes the left in Turkey is becoming isolated because it offers no serious political representation to the public.

Experts say the reasons for the upsurge in violence can be traced to the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and the war in neighbouring Syria.

Peace talks between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Ankara to end the 30-year conflict have been ongoing for two years and have also forced the left to reassess its ideological stances.

“There always has been violence in Turkish politics because of the authoritarian nature of the state, but this is very much related to the Gezi Park events and [the] confrontational way in which the police approached them,” says Joost Jongerden of the Wageningen University and Research Centre in The Netherlands.

“What is worrisome is the fact that politics in Turkey is becoming increasingly authoritarian.”

Turkey's leaders are continuing their show of defiance. Last week, prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu attended the funeral of Mr Kiraz, while 12 months ago, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to teenager Elvan as being "connected to terrorist organisations", just days after the child's death.

Meanwhile, radical leftist groups have promised to keep up their campaign for justice for Elvan.

“Anger of millions”

A Marxist-Leninist youth group known as the TMLGB, which is popular in Sarigazi, says the “fascist state cannot restrain the anger of millions . . . attacking people with gas, thousands of wounded people, hundreds of detained . . . Our weapons will be silent.”

Ugur Aytac also believes the ruling AKP encourages terrorist acts such as this month’s hostage taking of the prosecutor.

“The sense of justice in AKP’s Turkey is so disturbed that it leads to a belief that people cannot obtain justice,” he says, “and this problem creates social conditions in which terrorism establishes itself.”