The latest terrorist outrage in Turkey is almost certainly one more futile act of violence in a confrontation between the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Kurdish militants of PKK.
The rush-hour blast in a busy area of old Istanbul killed seven police officers in a passing bus and four civilians while injuring 36 other people, some of them seriously. Kurdish separatists were immediately blamed. The anger among ordinary Istanbulis was palpable. Of the city’s 14 million metropolitan population, some four million are Kurdish, making Turkey’s second city the largest concentration of Kurds in the country.
Officials from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party led by the charismatic Selahattin Demirtas condemned the attack, whether it was carried out by the PKK or Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS).
Beside the immediate destruction and heartache produced by terrorist attacks, they are in essence counterproductive. Shadowy men of violence assert their right to be noticed through death and destruction. They are certainly noticed. But that attention is the contempt of all right-thinking people. Decent society has no place for those who seek to achieve their aims by murder. Terrorists campaigns are no different from the crimes of serial murderers. They inevitably grab the headlines and they alarm decent people who will go about their lives in trepidation, but they achieve nothing save extra income for gravediggers.
But even in the face of the most horrific serial killings, life goes on. Baghdad has hardly been free of bombings since the US invasion of 2003. Thirteen years on, the mindless slaughter continues, but the Iraqi capital continues with its day-to-day business. And so it will be in Istanbul as it has in other countries that have been victims of the killers, including the Kingdom. These ruthless killers are fools because they do not see that they cannot win.
But if they chose to think about it, they themselves would realize the futility of their violence. Turkish jets and land forces have mounted devastating attacks on PKK concentrations on the Iraqi side of the border with Turkey. Thousands of militants have been killed or injured, along with civilians. Have these assaults persuaded the PKK leaders for one minute to consider ending their insurrection or have they rather deepened their determination to press on with the bloody insurrection? Or has the anger they engendered merely strengthened the resolve of the terrorist leaders to press on with their bloody campaign and to strike back in revenge?
The reaction of the Turkish government to PKK atrocities is no different.
The slaughter caused by Kurdish killers merely strengthens Ankara’s will to defeat them. The tragedy is that President Erdogan proved himself the first Turkish leader to have the political courage and power to reach out to the Kurds, broker a ceasefire and grant Turkish Kurds recognition of cultural and political rights that had long been denied them. The unravelling of his glittering political achievement has proven a calamity. But what was achieved once, can be achieved again. Erdogan has proved that an insightful politician can cut the Gordion Knot of a problem that almost everyone else believed could not be resolved.
The lesson of this latest mass murder in Istanbul is that blood will continue to flow needlessly until one day it is replaced by ink that flows from a pen onto an agreement that resolves this needless conflict.