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Explosions, not fireworks: Turkey at 80
By Iason Athanasiadis
ISTANBUL - In central Istanbul, a Union Jack
flaps at half-mast atop the British consulate stunned in
last Thursday's terrorist blast. Police barriers have
been dragged across all access streets to the site and
traders whose shops lie inside the secured area
surrender their ID cards at makeshift police desks
placed in the street. An armored personnel carrier,
machine gun-toting police and rows of vans parked by the
Galatasaray Lisesi school are the more visible signs of
the boosted security measures.
"I was at the
[Greek Orthodox] Patriarchate when the explosion
happened," says Dimitris Fragopoulos, one of Istanbul's
few remaining Greeks, whose house lies a few streets
away from the site of the blast. "I called home to check
on my wife. She was scared because the explosion had
shaken the house and plaster had fallen. Outside, shop
fronts had shattered. It was like an earthquake."
Today, a few meters away from the British
consulate, a red banner is splayed across the street,
above teams of police and workers clearing the site and
repairing the blast-damaged buildings. Erected by local
traders, it is emblazoned with the legend Terore
Cevabimiz Dimdik Ayaktayiz - a statement of intent
that the wave of home-grown terrorism that struck Turkey
on its 80th anniversary will be vanquished.
"Personally, I'm surprised that the British
embassy did not foresee such an attack in Istanbul while
[President George W] Bush was visiting London," says
Osman Kavala, a Turkish academic and businessman.
"Especially after the US consulate moved out from the
same area just recently. The British consul and his wife
would often be seen strolling around the neighborhood."
Istiqlal is a pedestrian street in Istanbul's
Beyoglu district, often viewed as the centerpiece of
modern, secular Turkey. With scarcely a hijab or
head-covering in sight, its clothes emporiums, fast food
bars and music shops represent the European Turkey that
its politicians conjure up when pushing for European
Union membership. At night, in the fashionable alleys
leading off Istiqlal, pimps, touts and prostitutes
invite partygoers and transvestites into the area's
trendy shisha bars and restaurants.
But just a
few streets away lies the working-class Sisli district,
where few bare-headed women - indeed, few women - are
visible. In the windows of local clothes shops, the
mannequins, their hair covered by a mandila,
model discount fashions. And further down, in the hilly
streets of Tarlabashi - a low-income, Kurdish
neighborhood - posters advertise for literate employees
alongside graffiti extolling Kurdish separatist leader
Abdullah Ocalan, currently in Turkish jail.
Crossing the Bosporus at the Galata bridge
deposits one in the teeming markets of Eminonu that
extend along the riverfront Corniche to the Yeni Camii
and the Egyptian spice bazaar. The thousands jostling
over cheap fabrics, cut-price electronics and pirated
CDs conjure up Medieval market scenes closer to Cairo's
Hussein district than the upscale Beyoglu neighborhood
lying across the river.
It is all a far cry from
the tidy, sanitized streets around the Topkapi palace
and Aghia Sofia museum, around which tourists mill. The
resentment bred by the exploits of a highly-visible and
secular nouveau riche class contributed to the success
of Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP)
in elections last year and flourishing Imam Hatip
and Quran Kursu religious schools. A wave of
Islamic conservatism is sweeping through Istanbul's
working classes that reacts against the poverty and
squalor in which a hefty proportion of Istanbul's
estimated 15 million inhabitants live.
"Turkey
slid into Islamism after the 1980 coup," says Frango
Karaoglan, an Istanbul-born, former Turkey
correspondent, "when the military broke the leftists,
introduced religious studies into the constitution and
Kenan Evren [the Turkish chief of staff who led the
coup] announced the advent of Islamo-Turkism. When the
first headscarves appeared in 1984-85," she says, "some
interpreted this as a reaction to the junta. They were
proven wrong."
The explosion at the British
consulate ripped through the heart of commercial
Istanbul and brought with it flashbacks from the
terrorism of the 1970s. In its aftermath, government
rhetoric sought to relate the strikes to the Kurdish
separatists who have sought to establish their own state
in southern Turkey. But nothing could hide the clear-cut
confrontation between a resurgent political Islam and a
secular military running out of ideas.
"In the
1970s, when the extreme right-wingers attacked the left,
they would go to their cafes and mow them down," says
Karaoglan. "Whatever security measures exist in Turkey
today - the lack of bins in public places, bag-searches
at theaters and exhibition spaces and so on - date from
that time."
It is these flashbacks that Turkey's
embattled government has capitalized on in recent days
in its bid to rally the nation. Sympathy for the suicide
bombers is almost non-existent in a nation where the
mainstream resurgent Islamism of recent years has lacked
the militant tinge espoused by Arab Islamist
organizations.
"Undoubtedly, some fervent,
Turkish Muslims would have felt a hidden sympathy," says
a Turkish analyst who prefers not to be named, "but they
would never have expressed it publicly. However, the
pro-Islam papers very openly said on their front covers
that the bombings were a conspiracy against Turkey
between the CIA [US Central Intelligence Agency] and
Mossad [Israeli intelligence] and this is a view that is
widely shared by the people."
For the time
being, the mounting tension between the military and
Erdogan's government is still confined to spats over
whether Islamically-dressed students should be allowed
to attend university lectures and alcohol be served in
state-run restaurants. Analysts warn, however, that a
lack of perceived government cooperation in the current
investigation could push the so-called "deep state" into
taking alternative action.
"If the attacks
continue the government will topple," says Hassan Kaoni,
a professor of international relations who sits on the
influential, army-dominated National Security Council.
"At the moment, these attacks are not directed against
the Turkish government but at Western targets. Should
they continue, however, then the Turkish government will
fall."
Last Friday at noon, several hundred
muezzins called the faithful for the main prayer
of the week. In Arab countries - including the secular
republics of Egypt and Syria - entire cities come to a
stop for the Friday khutba, sacred off days when
whole streets are closed in order that the crowds that
spill out of the mosques can bow onto the carpet-strewn
tarmac and pray. Not in Turkey, where the rhythms of
weekday Istanbul imperceptibly slow down. Out in the
streets, traffic continues its klaxon-accented progress,
music blares out of shops, and patrons of bars go on
sipping raqi with their lunch.
"The majority of
Turkish Muslims," says Kavala, "believe that the
current, secular system should not be modified. That
they don't have aspirations for political Islam is a
success of the republican experience."
It is
this same republican experience that has contributed to
the paradox of an Islamist organization attacking
Western targets in a secular Muslim country, under an
Islamically-inspired government.
"With the
coming to power of the AKP, some radical Muslim parties
created during the [Necmettin] Erbakan era lost their
meaning," says Mihalis Vasileiadis, the Istanbul-born
Greek editor of a newspaper. "Some members were picked
up by al-Qaeda but, being Turks, were useless for
operations outside Turkey, even in the Arab world. So
they were put to use domestically."
For the time
being, the AKP has deferred to the "deep state" for the
investigation and the recent spate of arrests of
suspects indicates that the enquiry is on course.
Similarly on course appears to be the phenomenon of the
Islamization of Turkey.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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