BY MICHAEL KARADJIS
The recent horrific bombings of two historic Turkish synagogues and two British targets in Istanbul, which left 52 people dead and some 70 injured, raise the question of why al Qaeda would target Turkey and massacre large numbers of Turkish civilians — Jews and Christians but mostly Muslims.
Last year, the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected to government with an overwhelming vote, much to the horror of the US-backed Turkish military establishment, which justifies its undemocratic powers on the grounds of its alleged duty to guarantee "secularism". In 1997 it ousted a previous "Islamist" party from government.
The conservative AKP government has gone out of its way to show Washington there is nothing threatening about its Islamist roots, and both before the US attack on Iraq and in recent weeks it has engaged in discussions with the US about sending Turkish troops into the Iraq conflict.
But both times it backed down. One reason is the overwhelming opposition of the largely Muslim population of Turkey to getting drawn into Iraq on the US side — polls show 90% of the population oppose any involvement, and this is strongly reflected in the AKP's voter base.
As a result, AKP MPs joined other MPs in rejecting legislation allowing the US to use Turkish bases for its Iraq invasion. This led US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz in May to claim that the Turkish military "for whatever reason, did not play the strong leadership role and attitude that we would have expected". In other words, the military should have overturned the parliamentary decision as the military has done in the past.
Several weeks ago, the AKP was ready to send 10,000 troops to Iraq to help the US crush the insurgency. On November 7, it withdrew from that decision. This was a significant blow to the US rulers, who are desperate to get others to share the task of sending their young men and women to kill and get killed in order to defend US interests in Iraq.
The recent bombings and the resulting "national security" crisi have hurt a moderate Islamist government which is keeping itself out of the Iraq war in defiance of the pro-US military brass.
On November 21, Turkey's National Security Council, consisting of leading generals, said the terrorist bombings in Istanbul required greater "cross-border" efforts to fight terrorism — across the Iraqi border, that is.
According to a BBC report, some "regard the one-year-old government's six reform packages as 'harbingers of political instability', saying that they have weakened the security forces, prosecutors and courts, depriving them of the means to fight and deter terrorism".
These democratic reforms, which are conditions for eventual European Union membership, undermine the power of the military, and the bombings may give it a chance to strike back using "national security" pretexts.
The leader of the right-wing "secular" True Path party, Mehmet Agar, chimed in, criticising the AKP for ending a countrywide crackdown on Islamic groups and amnestying several hundred "militants".
The first Turkish organisation to claim responsibility for the Istanbul bombings was the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front (IBDA/C). This group was not set up by al Qaeda, but has a 20-year history in Turkey. Two people arrested for the synagogue bombings were from the south-eastern town of Bingol, which is a hotbed of another group, Turkish Hezbollah (unrelated to the Lebanese resistance organisation of similar name).
These organisation were recruited by the Turkish military to fight the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey's south-east from 1984 onwards. They were responsible for the murder or disappearance of thousands of Kurdish activists.
When the war ended in the late 1990s, the military turned on its Islamist proxies, killing or imprisoning their leaders. However, according to the New York-based Peace Initiative/Turkey, "it is yet uncertain whether these terrorist groups operate totally independently of, and are not manipulated by, their old masters".
From Green Left Weekly, December 3, 2003.
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