After the worst attack of its kind in the country, Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has been displaying an incredible lack of grip and seriousness.
Mr Davutoglu has been making a few inaccurate remarks recently and I was inclined to blame them on the “bad advice” he may have received or to dismiss them as a mere slip of the tongue but his latest comments about who might be responsible for the 10th of October massacre has stretched patience beyond the limit.
Mr. Davutoglu’s statement on Wednesday that it was highly likely that both the PKK and ISIS were involved in Ankara attacks at the weekend is defying logic and based on the available evidence so far, suggesting an ‘ISIS- PKK joint front to undermine Turkey’ can only be described as laughable.
One of the suicide bombers was named as the missing brother of a man who committed a similar attack in July in the south eastern Turkish town of Suruc near the Syrian border. The second suspect is an Islamic State militant whose existence and threat were known and written about.
The names of the two suspects, Yunus Emre Alagöz and Ömer Deniz Dündar, as potential threats, were clearly spelt out by the Radikal newspaper columnist Ezgi Basaran after the Suruc attack in July this year and by another Radikal journalist in an investigation as early as two years ago.
There has been numerous accounts of families, especially from the town of Adiyaman where the suspects came from, reporting their fears to the authorities that their sons were joining IS and that the group was actively recruiting fighters among local sympathisers.
After Ömer Deniz Dündar was identified as one of the Ankara bombers, his father has again told The Radikal’s Idris Emen that his pleas to the police to stop his son’s involvement with ISIS fell on deaf ears. “I even asked the police to arrest him,” he said.
Last July, after the Suruc attack, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) asked for a parliamentary investigation to be opened.
The motion was rejected by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) deputies.
Then and now, the first instinct of the government has been to silence its critics and accuse them of sympathy for the ‘terrorists’.
Minutes after the bombs were set off, police used tear gas against the survivors of the attack in Ankara, adding insult to injury and delaying medical help from arriving.
As we have become accustomed to, in every major embarrassment to the government, a news blackout has followed. Like Suruc, the investigation into the Ankara attack has quickly become secret.
Whilst I always caution against throwing around accusations of “state complicity” without proof, how can I can disagree with the HDP spokesman Ayhan Bilgen when he says to the Reuters news agency: “This attack happened because none of the necessary steps were taken after the previous ones. We wouldn’t have lost so many of our people,”?
A pervasive lack of seriousness, accountability and credibility have become hallmarks of the AKP rule in recent years.
Nepotism, cronyism and partisan favouritism in key state institutions have never been so wide-spread and shameless.
Disrespect for the rule of law and separation of powers not only resulted in violations of fundamental rights but it has also weakened Turkey’s security.
Negligence and complacency by the security forces and the intelligence organisation MIT are nothing but the direct outcomes of this loss of capacity.
Mix it with an entrenched culture of impunity and immunity, you get the witches brew that is today’s Turkey.
This post is also available in: Turkish
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