High Tension in Turkey Due to So-called Ethnic Division

There have been some weird and disturbing incidents taking place in Turkey since 13 Turkish soldiers shot dead in Silvan province of Diyarbakir city by the separatist Kurdish militants of PKK on 14th July 2011. And interestingly, BDP (the largest Kurdish political party in Turkey) which has close connections with PKK, declared a unilateral Kurdish autonomy on the same day, in this Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. And the day after this gunfire ending with provoking casualties, the sad news of dead soldiers was taken to the headlines by almost all the newspapers in Turkey. But some of them were more signalizing then the others. Hurriyet and Aksam newspapers that both belong to Dogan Media Group the largest media cartel of Turkey (which is also famous of previous deliberately provocative activities in Turkish political history), were showing these both incidents side by side on their cover pages, unlike the other newspapers. It was so evident that these two different but seemingly relative incidents would be taken as a civil war signal by the Turkish nationalists. Well, it happened so. We can clearly see it from the following developments in the country.

Hurriyet was saying “13 martyrs” and “And they also declared their autonomy” while Aksam saying “We were trapped” and “We are declaring out autonomy! [reportingly]”.

On 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th July, there were protests by Turks in lots of cities around Turkey and in some of them the protesters walked over BDP offices in order to stone them. But security forces interfered the protesters.

On 15th July, Aynur Dogan a famous Kurdish singer was to singing at a concert together with lots of ethic singers from around the world, for the Istanbul Jazz Festival. When she came onto the stage and started to sing in Kurdish, thousands of Turkish audience immorally started to boo and assault her. Then she had to leave the stage.

On 16th July, there had been a street fight between Kurdish instruction workers and the residents in Aydin city, resulted 13 injuries.

But the most scary and disturbing one happened at night of 21st July in Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul. A group that was claimed to be consisted of PKK supporter Kurds, went on the streets and stoned the shop-stores and cars, then vanished away. After that, Turkish nationalist groups (some of them from nationalist MHP party’s youth organizations) emerged on the streets with sticks and knives in their hands. Now the conflict was dangerously on streets. The Zeytinburnu Mayor Murat Aydin came to the scene, and delivered a speech to the residents. He said all these are provocative activities and told them to stay calm. He also said there were electronic messages spreading via social media and he even received some of these messages that saying the Kurd killed some citizens in Zeytinburnu and these are completely lies. And he was right. There were some invisible agent provocateurs trying to create a chaos environment. And his statement was explaining everything that happening.

Some are trying to provoke Turks against Kurds while some others trying to provoke Kurds against Turks, as far as I see while closely following the developments.

www.anahtar.tv

Hamza Yardımcıoğlu