’Turkey has become a Dangerous Place’

Darko Lazar

A veteran journalist currently based in Beirut, who has done a fair share of work with Turkish media outlets, told me over a cup of coffee the other day that "Turkey has become a dangerous place."

His observation of the current state of affairs in Turkey -though it may sound like an oversimplification - is very appropriate indeed.

Last Saturday, Ankara became the sight of the worst single terrorist attack in Turkey's history, killing more than 90 people and leaving over 500 injured.

The target was a peace rally. The prime suspects: the Daesh terror group, and the Kurdistan Workers' Party [PKK]. No group, however, has claimed responsibility for the attack and, in true Erdogan fashion, the media has been banned from reporting on the investigation. So the rest of the story pretty much writes itself; Ankara's failed foreign and domestic policies have given rise to the deadliest wave of terror that the Middle East has ever known, and Turkey will not be exempt from the bloodshed.

One would assume that such a narrative would worry Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, especially with the looming snap elections slated for November 1st. But this appears to be exactly what Erdogan's ruling AK Party is banking on to regain the parliamentary majority it lost back in June.

Joaquins Flores is the Director of the Center for Syncretic Studies in Belgrade and he thinks that the "AKP now needs to employ a strategy of tension to get re-elected. Bush did this; Netanyahu did this. Given how much Erdogan has taken other strategies from these two men, it would not be surprising if he also employed a strategy of tension, or chaos." Flores adds that this strategy "may include the use of false flags and state-sponsored domestic terrorist attacks on civilians."

During the general elections on June 7th, the AKP were dealt a disappointing blow when they failed to acquire the parliamentary majority that Erdogan hoped would grant him the power to change Turkey's constitution. An even bigger surprise came from the Kurdish-affiliated People's Democratic Party [HDP], which was running for the first time and won a sizeable 13.1% of the vote. Faced with the grueling task of having to appease political rivals in order to form a coalition government, Erdogan opted for a snap election instead.

To make matters worse, widespread allegations of Ankara's support for terrorist groups in Syria came to a climax in the weeks leading up to the polls in June. Turkey's Cumhuriyet daily published photographs and posted videos online of trucks belonging to the country's intelligence services transporting weapons to Syrian militants, including Daesh.

According to prominent whistleblower Fuat Avni, Erdogan was furious over the revelations.

"Erdogan ordered the critical media to be silenced", Anvi wrote on Twitter. But despite the government's ensuing crackdown on Turkey's media, the AKP still had a poor showing at the polls.

The head of the Ankara-based SESA Institute of political social and economic studies, Dr. Bilal Sambur, is not surprised by this outcome. "Under the current circumstances, the Turkish political situation does not allow any party to come to power alone. There will probably be a coalition government after the November 1st elections, unless an extraordinary development happens", Dr. Sambur said.

Extraordinary or not, by the time summer came around and the November elections were announced, Erdogan was not taking any chances. First he announced military operations against Daesh, following another major terrorist attack that killed over 30 Kurdish activists in southern Turkey. One day later on July 24th, Turkey also launched airstrikes against the PKK, effectively ending a ceasefire with the Kurdish group, which has been in place since 2012.

In his essay, titled ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime' and published in 1985 at Cambridge University, Charles Tilly writes that, "War makes states, I shall claim. Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum". Tilly defends his thesis by arguing that when a statesmen "produces both the danger and, at a price, the shield against it, he is a racketeer... since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers."

In evaluating Erdogan's policies using Tilly's argument, it is perhaps no surprise that "Turkey has become a dangerous place".

Political analyst and journalist for the Sputnik News Agency, Andrew Korybko told me that, "everything that occurred this summer before the snap election announcement was pure posturing and time-buying on the administration's part, since it never wanted to form any kind of coalition government or reach an accommodation with the opposition parties. Crushing the ceasefire with the Kurds was the first step of Erdogan's emergency re-election strategy." Korybko also thinks that, "Erdogan doesn't have any real intention in fighting Daesh; the whole announcement was a ploy to ‘justify' what he had thought would be an imminent invasion of Syria."

In over 12 years under Erdogan's rule, Turkey was silently transformed into a state where repression, censorship and violence are commonly used by the government, with the country's foreign policy centered on supporting terrorism. Manufacturing both the threat and claiming to offer the ‘shield', Erdogan is hoping to maintain his grip on power regardless of the cost. But if June's election results are anything to go by, Erdogan may have his work cut out for him in trying to completely transform Turkey into his own ultra-centralized Sultanate.

Source: al-Ahed News