{"id":64916,"date":"2013-02-09T13:14:11","date_gmt":"2013-02-09T11:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=64916"},"modified":"2014-01-08T00:13:51","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T22:13:51","slug":"a-look-at-turkeys-past-gives-some-insight-into-its-unresolved-troubles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2013\/02\/09\/a-look-at-turkeys-past-gives-some-insight-into-its-unresolved-troubles\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look at Turkey\u2019s Past Gives Some Insight Into Its Unresolved Troubles"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Look at Turkey\u2019s Past Gives Some Insight Into Its Unresolved Troubles<\/h1>\n

By TIM ARANGO<\/h6>\n
Published: February 8, 2013<\/h6>\n
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ISTANBUL \u2014 Two galleries in this city\u2019s old European quarter recently opened exhibitions that showcase the political violence that convulsed the country in the 1970s. The echoes for contemporary Turkey were unmistakable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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SITE Intelligence Group, via Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images<\/h6>\n

Alisan Sanli, identified as the bomber in the embassy attack last week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On one wall are rows of old newspapers that chronicled through blaring headlines and grainy photographs the bloody street fighting and chaotic demonstrations that culminated in a military coup in 1980.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201cSocialist revolution can only be achieved in Turkey through armed victory,\u201d is how one newspaper of the time described the aims of a radical left-wing group that promised to use \u201crevolutionary terror\u201d and \u201curban chaos\u201d to realize Marxist rule.<\/p>\n

That bloody past burst violently into the present with last week\u2019s suicide bombing of the American Embassy in the Turkish capital, Ankara. Initially assumed by many to be the work of Islamic extremists, the attack was quickly traced by the authorities to a man who sneaked into the country by boat from a Greek island in the Aegean Sea and was linked to a homegrown left-wing extremist group whose roots lie in the tumult of the \u201970s.<\/p>\n

As such, the bombing \u2014 even though it struck an American target and was motivated in part by American policy in the Middle East \u2014 revealed more about modern Turkey, its violent past and potential for instability than it did about the United States\u2019 campaign against terrorism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was no Benghazi,\u201d wrote Ross Wilson, a former American ambassador to Turkey, in an online column for the Atlantic Council, referring to last year\u2019s attack by Islamic extremists on a diplomatic outpost in Libya that resulted in the death of the American ambassador and three others.<\/p>\n

For Turkey, the attack was an unpleasant reminder that despite a decade of reforms under the current ruling party, which is rooted in political Islam and headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has yet to fully emerge from its dark past. Coming at a time when Turkey, with its prosperous economy and political stability, is trying to present itself as a model for countries convulsed by the Arab Spring revolutions, the attack served for many Turks as a reminder of the work left to put their own house in order.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think what people have forgotten, because of what happened here in the last 10 years, was how violent Turkish politics used to be,\u201d said Gerald Knaus, of the European Stability Initiative, a policy research organization based in Istanbul. \u201cIn the last 10 years Turkey tried to emerge from this period of political violence and confront the skeletons in its closet. But we\u2019ve forgotten how many skeletons there were.\u201d<\/p>\n

The attack also underscored how Turkey\u2019s rulers sometimes use those skeletons to justify a growing crackdown on dissent, particularly with a campaign against the news media that has Turkey as the world\u2019s leading jailer of journalists \u2014 more even than China or Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the activist who blew himself up today had possessed a press card, they would have called him a journalist,\u201d Mr. Erdogan said in comments broadcast on Turkish television shortly after the bombing last week that were immediately condemned by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.<\/p>\n

Before the attack, Turkish security forces rounded up nearly 100 people accused of ties to the outlawed Revolutionary People\u2019s Liberation Front, the organization the perpetrator belonged to, among them journalists, lawyers, even members of a rock band. The arrests were condemned by human rights groups as another example of Turkey\u2019s broad use of antiterrorism laws to crack down on domestic opponents, particularly journalists and human rights lawyers, with no links to violent activities.<\/p>\n

\u201cTurkey\u2019s overbroad antiterrorism laws have been used against an ever-widening circle of people charged for nonviolent political activities and the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression, association and assembly,\u201d Human Rights Watch wrote in a report condemning many of the arrests.<\/p>\n

Efkan Bolac, a member of the Contemporary Lawyers Association, was detained in that roundup but was released for lack of evidence.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lawyer doesn\u2019t become a rapist if he represents one, or a drug dealer if he represents one,\u201d Mr. Bolac said. \u201cThey claim we are members of a terror group, but how is that possible when we spend our entire time at courthouses?\u201d<\/p>\n

This week the American ambassador to Turkey, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., said the F.B.I. was investigating the attack and suggested that the Justice Department might prosecute the group that carried out the bombing.<\/p>\n

Yet the attack seemed out of another time and carried a whiff of cold-war-era intrigue, when links between the C.I.A. and Turkey were central to efforts by the United States to counter Soviet influence in the region. It also upended the conventional narrative about modern terrorism. \u201cYou\u2019d think 10 years after the war on terror things would be clearer rather than more obfuscated,\u201d said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.<\/p>\n

In his column in The Hurriyet Daily News, Nihat Ali Ozcan, a security specialist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, likened the attack to a \u201ccold-war-style proxy war\u201d that he speculated was the work of Syria, given the historical links between the group and Syrian intelligence. His observation was reminiscent of the paranoia of a bygone era. At one of the art galleries here, newspapers chronicled the 1977 May Day celebration in Istanbul, when leftist groups gathered for a demonstration that turned bloody.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis attack is a provocation that links all the way to the C.I.A.,\u201d one headline shrieked.<\/p>\n

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Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A version of this article appeared in print on February 9, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Look at Turkey\u2019s Past Gives Some Insight Into Its Unresolved Troubles.<\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Look at Turkey\u2019s Past Gives Some Insight Into Its Unresolved Troubles By TIM ARANGO Published: February 8, 2013 ISTANBUL \u2014 Two galleries in this city\u2019s old European quarter recently opened exhibitions that showcase the political violence that convulsed the country in the 1970s. The echoes for contemporary Turkey were unmistakable. SITE Intelligence Group, via […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":64917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[8747],"class_list":["post-64916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa","tag-dhkp-c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}