A Pattern of Violence

'This is a Bloodstained Square'

The moment the first of the two bombs goes off is captured on a video clip: a group of young people are joined together in an embrace, performing a traditional Anatolian folk dance. Eerily, they are singing 'This is a bloodstained square'. They exude happiness, however, and the atmosphere is festive. Then, suddenly, there is a blast behind them. There are flames, and the blue, sunny sky is shrouded by a cloud of smoke that quickly expands. The dancers cast a quick glance backwards before diving for cover. The picture is blurred.

On 10 October 2015, over one hundred leftist peace activists, Turks and Kurds, were blown up in Ankara. They were assembling on the square next to the train station in Ankara when the two suicide bombers struck. The activists had heeded the calls of several trade unions and of the pro-Kurdish and socialist Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) to protest against the war that the Turkish military was waging against Turkey's own Kurdish citizens in the south-east of the country, laying waste to entire towns. The massacre in Ankara is the deadliest terrorist attack in Turkey to date. Yet it was anything but atypical in terms of what it stood for politically. The carnage fitted all too well into a pattern of mass killings since the late 1960s: the victims are invariably leftists, other democrats, or ethnic and religious minorities. The perpetrators are drawn from the country's deep, popular reservoir of ultra-conservatives and ultra-nationalists. Those who commission the massacres and the assassinations lurk in the shadows.

The Ankara massacre followed on the killing of over 30 young socialists in a suicide bombing a few months earlier. On both occasions, the authorities identified the perpetrators as Turkish citizens who they claimed had acted on behalf of the so-called 'Islamic State'. The latter, however, did not claim responsibility for the Ankara massacre. Progressives and liberals felt they had good reason to suspect that the suicide bombers in Ankara had acted with the encouragement, or at very least the protection, of the Turkish state. To many, it seemed obvious that history was repeating itself, that elements of the infamous Turkish 'deep state' – the right-wing networks of conspirators and assassins embedded within the state – had been reactivated to crush the Kurdish and Turkish left. Hasan Cemal, a prominent liberal journalist, wrote that he harboured no doubt at all that President Erdogan's regime had brought the instruments of the deep state back into use.

The lyrics of the song that was interrupted at the peace rally in Ankara in 2015 – 'This is a bloodstained square' – referred to Beyaz?t Square in Istanbul, where two young leftist demonstrators were slain by a fascist mob on 16 February 1969. Establishing a pattern that was to be repeated many times, the police stood by passively, and the perpetrators, none of whom were brought to justice, were defended by a right-wing government that blamed the victims for what had happened. In the same vein, the Islamic conservative government in 2015 displayed no empathy for the victims, instead accusing the organizers of the rally of having deliberately willed the carnage, supposedly with the purpose of destabilizing the government. Again in accordance with the historical pattern, no security measures whatsoever had been taken to protect the rally, and, according to the Association of Turkish Doctors, the intervention of the police – firing tear gas over the site of the massacre – caused the deaths of several of the wounded.

The 'Bloodstained Sunday' of 1969, as it became known, was immortalized by the left-wing folk singer Ruhi Su. The cultural life of Turkey has historically been dominated by the left, but the Turkish state has also been pitiless in its persecution of those who have been the leading embodiments of the country's culture, and Su was no exception. He was pursuing a career at the Turkish State Opera when in 1952 he was sentenced to prison for five years for having been a member of the banned Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). The Turkish state persecuted Su until his death, indeed caused it. Diagnosed with cancer, he applied for a passport in order to be able to travel to Europe for treatment; his request was turned down, and when the authorities finally acquiesced, it was too late for him to be cured. The 'Bloodstained Sunday' that Ruhi Su helped to immortalize was the starting point of a decade of right-wing violence. Its purpose was to intimidate the left and derail the social democratic movement that was on the rise during the first half of the 1970s. These goals were achieved. The violence in Turkey during the 1970s drew little international attention, and this is also a period that is glossed over in accounts of modern Turkish history. Yet it was a momentous era, and we will return to it later.

On International Labour Day in 1977, Istanbul's Taksim Square was the site of carnage. A crowd of several hundred thousand had gathered when unidentified assassins opened fire from the high-rise blocks that surround the square. At least 40 were killed. In 1978, hundreds of Alevis were massacred in the cities of Kahramanmara? and Çorum. The Alevis are heterodox Muslims whose syncretistic creed amalgamates elements of Shiite Islam, pre-Islamic traditions and Anatolian popular culture; in social terms, they have historically belonged to the underprivileged. They are estimated to make up perhaps as much as 15 to 20 per cent of the population of Turkey, and there are Turkish as well as Kurdish Alevis. The Alevis have been the victims of social and religious discrimination and oppression for centuries, from the days of Ottoman rule up to the present. This has made them a natural, left-leaning constituency; they present a parallel to the similarly socially underprivileged and traditionally oppressed Shiites in Iraq and Lebanon, who used to provide communist parties with a strong popular base in those countries. Hasan Fehmi Güne?, a social democrat who served as interior minister in 1978, later bore witness that the National Intelligence Agency of the state had in fact armed and directed the Sunni mob that carried out the massacres of the Alevis. The complicity, or at the very least criminal negligence, of the Turkish state was again on display in 1993: this time, Alevis and leftists were attacked by a Sunni mob in the city of Sivas. A hotel where a group of leftist writers – most of whom were Alevis – had gathered for a culture event, was set on fire. The police and the gendarmerie passively stood by, doing nothing to disperse the mob or to prevent it from starting the fire. Thirty-five were killed.

As just noted, the campaign of fascist violence in the 1970s went largely unnoticed by...