Turkey after the bombings: An Islamist facing Islamic terrorism

Date: 29/11/03

The prime minister's conundrum

THE juxtaposition of the words “Islam” and “terrorism” was “intolerable”, declared Turkey's prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, after last week's double round of suicide-bomb attacks in Istanbul. Millions of Turks, who embrace Turkey's brand of moderate Islam, agree. Few approve of al-Qaeda, which took responsibility for the attacks on two Istanbul synagogues and on the British consulate and the local headquarters of HSBC, a London-based bank.

As Turkey responds to its worst-ever terrorist attacks - at least 17 people have been arrested over them - Mr Erdogan must strike a balance between pious supporters and opponents in a pro-secular establishment who say he is still an Islamist at heart. That has been the challenge since his Justice and Development Party swept to power in parliamentary elections a year ago. After all, Mr Erdogan and the co-founders of his party started as openly pro-Islamic and anti-western.

No sooner had he won the elections, though, than Mr Erdogan disavowed this Islamist past and pledged allegiance to Turkey's pro-secular, western orientation. The parliament dominated by Mr Erdogan's party has since approved a slew of reforms that have improved Turkey's chances of starting negotiations for European Union membership. In October parliament approved a bill authorising the government to send thousands of troops to serve with the Americans in Iraq - though opposition from Iraq's Governing Council then forced the Americans to withdraw their request for Turkish help. Turkey was thus in many ways a perfect target for al-Qaeda.

The government must take firmer action against local Islamic militant groups if it is to maintain its pro-western secular image on the one hand, while on the other hand avoiding more terrorist attacks. Western diplomats have been alarmed by the preponderance of claims, even in mainstream newspapers, that the CIA and Israel's Mossad spy service were behind the bombings. “It raises the question of whether some members of the government share that view,” comments one.

The other difficulty is how to deal with the terrorist threat without putting democratic reforms on hold. The suicide bombers who carried out the synagogue attacks were identified by Turkish police as ethnic Kurds from the province of Bingol in Turkey's impoverished south-east. The authorities have refused to confirm the identities of those who struck the two British targets. But press reports say they were also Turkish citizens who helped to plan the synagogue attacks. And one was yet another ethnic Kurd from Bingol.

All the bombers are suspected of having links with Hizbullah. This is a shadowy group, with no known connection to its Lebanese namesake, which was covertly backed by Turkish security forces because its main targets in the past have been Kurdish nationalists who were either sympathetic with or active members of the PKK, a group that waged a 15-year separatist insurgency in the south-east.

The PKK called a truce in 1999, after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Having outlived their usefulness, Hizbullah militants themselves became targets of the security forces, in a series of raids throughout Turkey. The group's leader, Huseyin Velioglu, was killed in January 2000. But hundreds of his men escaped across the border into Iran and northern Iraq, where some are thought to have teamed up with a local Islamist terrorist group formed by Iraqi Kurds, which in turn developed links with al-Qaeda.

It should come as no surprise to the Turkish authorities that the country's worst troublemakers come from the Kurdish provinces in the south-east. The government's recent reforms include measures to enable 14m Kurds to broadcast in their own language and to teach it in privately run courses for the first time. But they have remained only paper reforms so far. Rampant unemployment feeds religious extremism and separatist passions in places such as Bingol, where annual income per head in 2001 was $780, compared with a national average of $2,150. Mr Erdogan has yet to visit any Kurdish provinces as prime minister. It is time he did.