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.
It is now well established that these attacks are linked with Turkey’s disastrous involvement in the Syrian civil war. The Ankara and Suruç bombers were two brothers, who, like the perpetrator of the Diyarbakır attack, travelled to Syria to join ISIS and then returned to carry out atrocities against Kurds, non-Sunnis and socialists. The astonishing series of intelligence and security failures that have led to these attacks – exposed despite the government’s media ban by a handful of stubborn journalists, in particular in the daily Radikal – 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.
Together with the escalating conflict in the Kurdish southeast, it has also given credence to suspicions that one of Turkey’s old demons – the so-called ‘deep state’ – has resurfaced, now in alliance with the country’s beleaguered president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It might be useful to retrace some of the critical twists and turns in Turkey’s maze-like political history to assess the credibility of these fears.
