Whatever I write will fail. But something has to be written,
though the words have all been gutted. People say “massacre”, “murderer”,
“barbarous”, “genocide”, “liar”, but we have been using those words for years,
and they have exhausted their sting. So what’s left? Something hurts and we
need something besides rhetoric and ideology to answer it.
Today, I was coming off the ferry in Kadıköy. It was windy
on the wharf. There were the usual gypsy flower sellers, the simit stands, the
Black Sea band by the water. Some schoolgirls were tossing bread to gulls and
terns flying by the sea. A melancholy, beautiful blue sky reflected in the
waves. Near the highway there was an AKP election tent. A group of men stood in
front, holding pamphlets no one was taking. One disheveled, bearded man handed
some brochures to a boy I assumed was his son. I stopped.
“Monsters,” I said aloud, reflexively. “Killers.” And the
whole world seemed to go dark with hate.
The whole afternoon had changed.
Everything has changed.
I’ve never kept an enemy. When I think about it now, I’ve
never truly hated anyone, not for very long and not for real, but for the past
week a storm of violent thoughts has raged in my head, and they profoundly
disturb me. Worse, I don’t really want them to go away.
Last week, over one hundred innocent people were blown to
shreds in a bomb attack in the capital of Ankara. More have died since and
countless others are lain up in the hospital. The victims were students and
middle-aged mothers and grandfathers. There were two young newly weds and an
eighty year old woman, one of Turkey’s “Saturday Mothers” who for years has
protested the State’s disappearing of her son. They were all gathered for a
peace march, to protest the renewed fighting between the Turkish Army and the
PKK. Their bodies were literally blown apart, so that even days after the
attack chunks of meat are still being found in the area around Ankara’s train
station.
The people of the AKP party, the people I now stare at on
this wharf, have been celebrating these murders.
A glance at the week’s news.
On Sunday, pop star Tuğba Ekinci tweets to President Erdoğan
in response to the murders, “We should remake the East, take the clean people
and put them in government housing and then bomb the rest to oblivion.”
On Wednesday night, in Konya, at a soccer game between
Iceland and Turkey, the two teams stand on the field for a moment of silence to
mourn the dead. The Turkish fans jeer and boo them. Some shout Allahu Akbar.
On Friday, former President Gül tweets, "If we cannot even express our sympathy, how can we still claim we will live together?" After the bombings, he had called HDP co-chairman
Selahattin Demirtaş to express condolences and had been reprimanded by the AKP.
A media ban is issued. No one is allowed to report on the
investigation on the bombing. Lawyers for the victims are banned from accessing
their files. This does not apply to the government papers, who report daily on
the results of the investigation. ISIS was working with the PKK, they say. The
Kurds bombed themselves to get votes, they say. And then because these absurdities
are the official news, foreign agencies pick them up and introduce their
obscene assertions with phrases like “The Turkish press has determined…” “The
Prime Minister’s Office says…”
You can only stand aghast at the way such malignant
disinformation becomes news. It’s an abomination, a deliberate polluting of the
memory of those who died.
The trouble is the foreign press can’t read the secret
codes.
Days before the bombing, a mafia boss named Sedat Peker led
a rally in Erdoğan’s hometown in Rize. He said to the maddened crowd, “We will
make all of their blood flow like a flood!” On Thursday, he was awarded two
police escorts by the state security bureau to guide him around—presumably to
protect him from revenge attacks against those who “misconstrue” him as
responsible. This is one of those things that someone not neck-deep in recent
Turkish history would never get the significance of. This man worked with the state
in the nineties—implicated in murder, racketeering, everything you can think of.
He is what’s called a Turanist, a Turk who believes that the destiny of Turkey
is to seize all the land belonging to Turks from Xinjiang to Anatolia and
transform it into Lebensraum for the master race. People know, but have never
proven, that he was involved in the Deep State assassinations of the 90s.
People suspect, with good reason, the hand of the Deep State in this bombing,
too. No one assigned an escort to Hrant Dink when he received direct
assassination threats, and he was shot in front of his own office in a case
that is still ongoing and implicates many government officials. And what does a
mafia boss who controls a crime organization need with someone else’s security
anyway? The assignment of state protection is a message to the country that
most foreigners, and certainly the press wouldn’t understand. A sly wink.
And there are so many such messages.
Articles in Turkish newspapers reveal the names of the
bombers. They had been tracked and bugged and followed by police for two years, taken into custody but not arrested because, quote, “there
was not enough evidence against them,” despite the fact that their ISIS cell, the "Weavers" (Dokumacılar) had been infiltrated for months. The press calls this a "security lapse". Yet the same papers reported the arrest
of three foreigners aid workers, helping Syrian refugees at the Bulgarian border—taken in for spying, working
with Israel, and various other made up comic book crimes. And what about the arrests of thousands of Kurdish politicians in 2011 based on thousands of pages of phone taps? Or the arrest of people PROTESTING THE ANKARA MASSACRE? The message? Anyone living in
Turkey knows that arrests are never made on the basis of real evidence. The security net, when they want it to be, is absolute. Letting
these murderers roam free is a political choice, a chess move.
In Forbes, an article comes out that gives a paragraph to
one of the forbidden eye-witness reports. A man was trying to help a woman who
was bleeding to death. A cop yanked him off of her. “Don’t help them! They’re
terrorists.” Others report that the police formed a line that prevented the
crowd from escaping after the first bomb went off. In today’s paper, you read
of a doctor massaging a man’s heart and being tear gassed by riot police who
ran through the crowd of bleeding and dying beating and gassing whomever they
found.
One of these injured is my wife’s friend Gülşen. She is a
young woman in her early thirties, barely five feet tall. She lies in the hospital with a wound in her
leg, infected because it is filled with bits of bone from other people. Because
of the infection, she has been kept in isolation. She had assumed that the
doctors were lying to her. That the wound wasn’t all that serious but that all
her friends were dead and they were trying to protect her from this knowledge.
For days, she waited for the “truth” that she was the only one left alive.
On Sunday, we went to the funeral of Kübra Meltem Mollaoğlu,
a woman who worked at the Üsküdar HDP office with my wife. As the imam spoke
prayers over the coffin, her twenty something daughter wailed and wailed, MOM!
MOM! Something in the crowd broke when the pall-bearers began to carry it to
the hearse. “MURDERER ERDOĞAN” they shouted. The men in the woman’s family
tried to shush them. “Not here!” they hissed. Did they not approve of the chant
or of the politicizing of the funeral? There were riot cops all along the
street and a police helicopter overhead, monitoring the burial of this woman
who chose to work for a cause that for the first time, offered something
besides strongmen and race hate. Would the police attack? Would they let
someone else attack? What was the point? What could these boys in their riot
helmets be thinking?
When I consider these cops and that boy in the AKP tent,
when I think of the fans in Konya jeering the moment of silence or that awful
pop star. When I see the names of the police who gassed the dying in Ankara or
think of the faces of the young men behind the helmets at the funeral, I want
to see them suffer. I want them to go into prison and die under the torture
that their kind used for years in Turkey’s prisons. And then I want the old
religion to be right. I want to see their souls cast into the pit. I want to
see them burn. I want to stand on the edge of the Pit with Azrael and hear them
scream.
What ugliness they have awakened in my soul! In all of our
souls. And I have no resistance any more, I don’t want to mediate, I don’t want
to compromise or sit at a table and discuss our opposing views. This isn’t
polarization anymore. This is a moral choice, to stand with monsters or against
them. And I know how awful that sounds, how dehumanizing and demonizing, and
what this government and the racism has done to me results in what I am
now—someone sick with vengeance, who wants to feel this way, who is comforted
by nothing else.
And if I feel that way, a newbie on the outskirts, what must
countless others feel? For those still shouting peace I feel nothing but awe.
There was a Kurdish woman whose video went viral on Twitter after the killings.
She shouted, “We will have peace. Kill us, murderer us, butcher us. We will
still have peace!”
I’m not that good anymore. If I ever was.
