When something as vile and as terrible as the Ankara bombings befall a country, the immediate instinct of the media and the population at large is to perform a very basic whodunnit and why. And in many countries the answers come quick and they come with a satisfying certainty. But in Turkey the opposite is true. For most neutral observers the who did this is obvious, as is the why, but when the Prime Minister immediately comes out and lists the potential perpetrators as pretty much anybody who has planted a bomb in Turkey in the last twenty years, then the hope that, in the first place the satisfaction of truth will ever be felt, and in the second, that the actual perpetrators will ever be fully brought to justice, is washed away in the tragi-comic slanging match that is pre-election Turkey.
In its place though there is a huge space for the victims of this tragedy to fill. For unlike many similar attacks in Europe or the Western world in general, it is in the knowing of the victims of this horror, rather than the perpetrators, that we can learn much about the society they both inhabit, and where that society might be headed. To get to know the painful but defiant growth of the social liberal movement in Turkey and beyond that is pushing to become as much of a political force as Islamism, rather than endlessly trying to explore the modern Muslim psyche through the prism of intellectually backward psychopaths, is both wise and fair.
In the middle of these two opposing forces, in democratic, secular Turkey, is the democratic, slightly uncomfortably secular, AK party government. And they, paradoxically, feel far more threatened by the new liberal left than they do by the alarming emergence of Islamic State networks in many of its major cities.
The type of young people who turned up on a Saturday morning in Ankara to march for peace and who gathered before in Suruc to give humanitarian aid to the people of Kobane in war ravaged Syria, are people who any country should be enormously proud of but whose own country, at the very best, has let down. And at the very worst, has let die.
And who exactly these people are is a more varied story than we might imagine, many ethnic Kurds of course, and many from the strongly secular Alevi Muslim minority. Alongside them too are many descendants of the left wing movements of the past, whose traditional enemy has evolved from extreme right nationalists, to these days, for want of a better phrase, religious nationalists.
The latter group’s views on the merits of socialism and rather quaintly, communism, might jar with a lot of common people as might the Kurds sometimes intense ‘with us or against us’ style focus on their own agenda but for the most part, they share a commitment to a new way of doing things that involves peaceful resistance and dialogue, with an overall aim of creating a new liberal model of society where minority rights and personal freedoms are sacred.
The commitment to these ideals has also attracted the attention of many young ordinary Turks with no previous strong political affiliations, but whose parents may have been leaning towards the nationalist or the religious, and so this movement, despite the fact that there are many competing flag flyers who still try to claim it as their own, has created for itself an opportunity to unite people under no other flag than the flags of fairness, tolerance and peace.
Their most fitting political representation comes from a possibly surprising source. The political wing of the Kurdish revolutionary group the PKK has evolved over the years into what is now the HDP, The People’s Democratic Party. And under the leadership of the charismatic Sellahatin Demirtas it has taken its traditional issue of Kurdish rights and packaged it alongside other issues of concern to many other Turks, and categorizing them all as sub sections of a greater struggle. The struggle for fairness and tolerance.
It is a long road though, their association with the PKK will always hold them back, as does the behaviour of the PKK itself. They stood quietly at the fringes as Demirtas led the HDP into parliament for the first time, and in the process prevented an AK party majority. But then after the Suruc bombing the PKK decided, with a depressing predictability, that the best way to stop people from being blown up in bombs was to blow up other people in bombs and with the enthusiastic participation of the government, they restarted a cycle of violence that only added to the grief of the nation and gave the AK party a nice big stick to run after the HDP with. The eventual aim being that either the HDP is removed from parliament on a charge of supporting terrorism, or there is a perpetual postponement of elections until the ‘security situation’ improves, and for that read: Until the AK party can be certain of victory.
The government thus pits its focus, and much of the resources of the State, on the stifling of its political enemies and the consolidation of power rather than the prevention of bomb attacks especially bomb attacks against those said political enemies. For though the activities of a few thousand violent Islamic fundamentalists might threaten the peace and security of the State, it doesn’t (yet) threaten the AK party’s hold on power in the same way as this new, energetic, political movement does. And right now that’s all that matters.
To walk beneath this ugly darkness is a difficult thing, but many light the way, in life and in death. Sitting with a friend that sombre Saturday afternoon as the names of the dead started to be filter through, a scream broke the silence. Among the lights that went out in Ankara that morning was an old friend of hers. The bright girl with the broad smile who used to sit behind her in school had moved on from this world, the final moments of her young life spent in the service of tolerance and peace.
The contrast between that young life and those of the many old men who spend their own, luxuriously long, lives devoted to the pursuit of power and control should be a source of great shame for them. But very sadly of course, It isn’t.