As Turks mourn the deaths of the more than 100 people killed in Saturday’s bomb attacks, there is just as much anger as grief across the nation. The announcement by the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, that Islamic State was behind the bombings will assuage neither emotion. The domestic turmoil created by Turkey’s war with Kurdish armed groups, and the spillover of violence and chaos from the wider Middle East, mean that Turks are unlikely to be satisfied by simple assertions of this kind.
Instead, there is no shortage of speculation about who may have had an interest in organising such a deadly attack. Nor did the AKP-run government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do much to diminish the general atmosphere of distress and confusion when it reacted to the bombings by charging that “traitors” were at work, and by trying to block social media and other coverage of the event. As it approaches an election on 1 November, Turkey has entered a dark period where accusations fly and recriminations abound.
The level of public distrust in the authorities is such that the charge of Isis culpability is doubted by many, or at least not taken at face value. It is true that Turkey now finds itself on the frontline of western-led efforts to counter the extremist jihadi group. It has opened up its airfields to US warplanes active over Syria, and became much more active against the networks that Isis uses for its foreign recruits.
So it is certainly feasible that Isis struck in Ankara as an act of retaliation, because this was a street demonstration organised by pro-Kurdish, secular and liberal groups, thus making the Turkish capital a new theatre of the war raging in Iraq and Syria between Kurdish and Isis fighters. But many of Mr Erdoğan’s critics tend to favour a different, conspiratorial version of events – one whose very existence tells us a lot about the general level of suspicion in Turkish society. This version accuses the regime of activating a “deep state” to sow terror. It suggests that an alliance of paramilitary, mafia and secret service groups, not unlike that which plagued Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, is intent on exacerbating tensions between ethnic Turks and the 15-million-strong Kurdish minority, and thus galvanising Turkish nationalism. The reading is that this will play in Mr Erdoğan’s favour as he attempts to gain the commanding majority for the AKP party that eluded him last June.
Whether there is any such political gain in prospect may be doubted. Although questions about the obvious security failures on Saturday have yet to be answered, and there were anti-Erdoğan street protests after the attack, with cries of “Murderer!” directed at the president, the plot theory seems very implausible.
The one certainty is that the authoritarianism which is increasingly a feature of Erdoğan’s rule – media repression, political intimidation, slogans of hatred against all opponents, military escalation against the Kurds in the south-east – will not bring a solution to Turkey’s woes, but only deepen them. For Turkey’s partners, this calls for more vigilance, not less.
It is right and natural that many messages of solidarity were sent, from Europe and elsewhere, in the wake of the Ankara tragedy, and it is of course necessary to continue to work with Turkey on the refugee crisis. But nobody should be blind to the divisive and polarising nature of a regime run by a strongman who has been in power for 13 years and who stands accused of being ready to go to extremes to make sure he stays there. The best hope now is that next month’s elections will be free, fair, and safe.
