THESE ARE ALL ORGANIZED ACTS
By Bulent Kenes
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 20 2007
First the Catholic priest Andrea Santoro last year, then
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, and two days ago three
missionaries brutally murdered in Malatya in a publishing house that
distributes Bibles.
That the perpetration of all these horrific murders comes at critical
junctures for Turkey, which has been making painstaking efforts to
distance itself from the bureaucratic status quo and go through a
great democratic transformation, and which has been suffering all
the growing pains from this profound transformation, cannot be a
coincidence. Those who know Turkey well will no doubt have noticed
that whenever the country is about to go through a critical period,
these kinds of horrendous provocations turn out the nightmares that
the Turkish public unwittingly expects, and that these nightmares
never fail to disappoint these expectations.
The generally held opinion in Turkey is that these murders, which
take place at certain intervals of time and bear a resemblance to
one another in terms of the chosen targets (foreigners representing
the "enemy within"), assassins (naïve and nationalistic youth) and
methods (gangland-style massacres), are being organized by certain
hidden forces. It’s as if some dark force or forces are planning such
plots beforehand in different places, and when the time comes, they
stage these acts in a conjuncture that will rattle Turkey and shock
the world. All of the backgrounds of the above-mentioned horrendous
murders provide enough evidence to support such an opinion.
In all three cases, the targets have religious or ethnic identities,
of a particularly naïve sort. And in all three cases, the perpetrators
are either minors or young people who could be considered minor. In
all three cases, the police were easily able to immediately catch
the perpetrators. And even though there is a common doubt over that
the real sponsors are behind the curtains, these masterminds cannot
be deciphered.
In all three cases, the real purpose seems to be to tarnish Turkey’s
positive image in the eyes of the world public, considering that it
has been pursuing multidimensional policies of opening up to the world
in recent years, expediting the process of integrating into Europe,
has managed to attract a considerable amount of foreign investment
and has become a significant tourist destination and a country where
foreigners increasingly prefer to settle and buy property. And the
real purpose is to reverse the trend of integration into the world.
It is impossible to view such attacks on people of a different faith
during this critical period as separate from the negative effects
on the world public that will be created by video footage of the
most recent horrible event. It is undeniable that all these events
have taken place in Turkey, but it is just as undeniable that the
ideologies of the organizers of these brutalities will benefit to
the extent Turkey receives vehement reactions from abroad.
It is clear that these murders share in the paranoiac attitude of
the parvenu neo-nationalist movement which keeps remarking that
the homeland is slipping out of our hands, the country’s lands are
being sold, that missionaries are converting our Muslim children to
Christianity and that Turkey’s foreign policy is determined by the
EU and the US. In fact, the desire of those who masterminded these
murders is to tear Turkey away from the world, to cause it to turn
inward and to transform Turkey into the regime of a sui generic,
anti-democratic and primitive republic.
Therefore, it would not be surrealistic to argue that these murders
were masterminded to exploit a conjuncture when the troubles put
forward against Turkey have increased in magnitude with its Muslim
identity used as a pretext against it in the EU accession process,
to strengthen the arguments in question.
That is, these provocations, which will deeply affect the European and
the Western public, can never be coincidental. Although there weren’t
strong religious elements in the characters of the perpetrators, the
religious identity of the chosen targets must have been considered
sufficient to help them achieve these heinous goals.
May God protect humanity from the malice of these ignominious
organizers!
–Boundary_(ID_i22ss1SPdq HL/wKW7ugTXQ)–