Carnage in Istanbul and the point of no return

Turkey Airport blasts. Family members of victims outside the Forensic Medical Center in Istanbul, June 29, 2016. Emrah Gurel /Press Association. All rights reserved. Shortly after the attack on Istanbul’s Atatürk airport
on Tuesday night, a Greek colleague posted on his Facebook wall a message of
solidarity with his Turkish friends. “Hang in there”, he wrote. “You are not
alone.” One of his compatriots disagreed: “I think they are alone”.

“They are alone between an authoritarian government working on [its] own
agenda and [a] Europe that reaches out to them when looking for favours.
Secular, western looking Turkey is very much alone.”

The truth could not be expressed more bluntly. Amidst the
maddening routine of mass suicide attacks, prayforistanbul hashtags, media
blackouts and messages of sympathy and solidarity from world leaders, many  in Istanbul and across Turkey feel increasingly
alone and despondent in the face of a thick darkness engulfing the country ever
so tightly. The EU‘s normative influence here has sunk as low as its reputation.

No one expects these attacks to be properly
investigated or, for that matter, to be the last ones. Assuredly, no one will
resign. As usual, a gag order was issued immediately and President Erdoğan’s
puppet prime minister summarily concluded there had been no security failures
(even though the Turkish intelligence service apparently warned of a threat precisely against this
airport only weeks ago). The next morning, the AKP deputies in Ankara killed a
proposal by three opposition parties to establish a parliamentary commission to
investigate the attacks – just like they did after the Suruç and Ankara attacks
last year. On Thursday, the prime minister spoke at the inauguration of a new
bridge. His opening words under a rain of confetti: “Today is a day of
celebration…”

Erdoğan’s government indeed has an agenda: total control of Turkey's state institutions and complete legal impunity for its criminal actions. Tuesday night’s attack did not divert it from this task.
Late into that same night, the AKP parliamentarians were busy voting into law a
major court packing bill that will drastically reduce the ranks of Turkey’s higher
courts and replace them with jurists handpicked by the president – the final
nail in the coffin of Turkey’s wobbling judiciary. The law follows another that
passed last week, granting immunity from prosecution to security personnel and
civil servants involved in counter-terrorism activities – a task which these
days involves hunting down academics, journalists and students, as well as
militants.

As Turkey descends into dictatorship and chaos, a hapless
European Union announced on Friday the opening of a new chapter in the
country’s accession negotiations, fulfilling its role in the dirty bargain struck
with Erdoğan over the lives of refugees. Once the external anchor of Turkey’s
democracy, the EU‘s normative influence here has sunk as low as its reputation
among its many erstwhile supporters, who now feel utterly betrayed and abandoned.

No way out

One friend’s social media outburst after the airport
attacks summed up the growing sense of suffocation among the young, urbane population
of Istanbul:

“There is no exit. No way out of this hell.

Even if you wanted to abandon everything and fuck off from this country,
you would have to go through the airport. And there is no way out of there
either.

We’re done for. Done!”

In Istanbul, like in other Turkish metropolises, a
grim despondency has been taking over the upbeat optimism of younger
generations, who, until recently, had a love affair with this city, its buzzing
vibrancy and breathtaking landscape, despite its endless construction sites and
crazy traffic.

These are the accidental activists who poured onto streets and
squares three summers ago to save Gezi Park from demolition and push back an
overbearing government. Since then suppression has grown more intense, violent
and pervasive. Politics has failed them: a spineless CHP has done more to help
than to resist the AKP’s monstrous transformation, while the constructive
energy harnessed by the pro-Kurdish leftist HDP ahead of last summer’s general
election has been sacrificed on the altar of war between the Turkish state and
the PKK. The government is apparently more concerned
about the threat from high school students than militant jihadism.

Last month, a student protest in a high school
graduation ceremony in Istanbul over the Islamisation of education quickly spread to other high schools across the
country, among them Turkey’s most established and prestigious ones.

The
president swiftly issued a stern warning against “provocateurs”, followed by a Ministry
of Education statement about impending investigations against those who took
part in or supported the protests (the government is apparently more concerned
about the threat from high school students than militant jihadism). For many,
the price of dissent has become too high. More people now censor their own social
media activities for fear of prosecution and avoid public places and
demonstrations for fear of an attack or confrontation with the police – possibly both.

Unsurprisingly, leaving the country is on the lips of
many young people, albeit in different forms. Some think of it as the sensible
thing to do. Applications to study in European and American universities have reportedly skyrocketed in 2016. But leaving one’s
home, family, country is easier said than done. In any case, except for a
privileged minority, the whole venture can be prohibitively expensive and, given
the tight visa restrictions, simply unattainable.

Others think of it as a lowly escape; a dishonourable
and unthinkable act. They may not take part in the increasingly precarious
world of social activism (a dedicated core still do at the risk of being labelled as traitors and terrorists).

But in extraordinary
times the assumption of normalcy can also be an act of resistance. And yet
others think of leaving as unnecessary: life is still pulsating in Istanbul’s
increasingly isolated secular middle-class neighbourhoods for those who can enjoy
it. But the mood is toxic, with hints of inglorious nihilism reminiscent of Tel
Aviv and war-time Beirut. But the mood is toxic, with hints of inglorious nihilism reminiscent of Tel
Aviv and war-time Beirut.

That the talk of leaving still includes visa
applications and plane tickets – and not smugglers and boats – speaks volumes to
the colossal distance separating the depressed residents of the cosmopolis from
their new refugee neighbours.

For any of the three million plus Syrians that
arrived in Turkey since 2011, a city like Istanbul may well represent escape from
imminent death. For their reluctant hosts – who have on balance proved to be
endlessly more accommodating than most, if not all, European, North American and Gulf Arab countries – the
wretched newcomers are harbingers of trouble, instability and other unknown
ills. In Istanbul, one’s cure is truly another’s poison.

The same assumption of normalcy, rebellious when in
defiance of government imposed public morality, can become cruel and shameful
when it takes the form of ignoring the existence of refugees or turning a blind
eye – out of fear of retribution or nationalistic consent – to the state’s ongoing
destruction of Kurdish towns and the plight of more than 500,000 Kurds
internally displaced since last summer.

The “secular, western looking Turkey”
is also alone, because it continues to disregard the east, at its own peril.

A boat called
Civilisation

For all the unbridgeable gaps separating their
universes, there is something fundamental that binds the fate of the Syrian or
Kurdish refugee with that of the Istanbul urbanite and indeed the distraught
post-Brexit Londoner or the New Yorker who muses about moving to Canada if
Trump wins in November: they are all travelling on the same overcrowded refugee
boat and it is slowly sinking.

Those who are at the bottom are drowning. The
ones in the middle are feeling the pressure and panicking. Up on the deck,
first-class passengers are busy locking the hatch leading down, momentarily comforted
by the fake safety of privilege.

The appropriate name for this ill-fated boat would be ‘Civilisation’.
Like the Titanic, it was foolishly claimed to be unsinkable. When it struck the
iceberg, its hull ripped apart like paper. We should have known that if Baghdad
could fall, if Aleppo could crumble, so could any city on earth. Yet as Iraq
and Syria were being consumed by fire – with governments of ‘civilised’
countries fanning the flames – those of us in the middle and upper tiers followed
the terrifying spectacle in the safety of our homes and on TV screens as if
watching an episode of the Game of Thrones: this was not of our civilised world.
In any case, our walls would prove high enough to keep the wildlings out. The last time so many calamitous trends converged
at once, it took the destruction of two world wars to reset things.

Turkey is in the middle of this boat. Here, Erdoğan’s imaginary Ottoman empire has started to crumble before
it was even established. His jihadist chickens – nurtured to re-conquer for him
the lost provinces of the Levant – have come home to roost: it was apparently
an ISIS-inspired cell, with homegrown and foreign terrorists, that struck at
the heart of the empire during the holy month of Ramadhan, killing mostly
Muslims. In the Kurdish southeast, the state’s year-long brutal vengeance will spur
generations of radicalised Kurds, facing a sea of Sunni Turks overflowing
in religious zeal and nationalist anger.

There is a cautionary tale for everyone in Turkey’s
unfolding tragedy. It is a tale of false prophets who capture democratic
institutions by exploiting the resentments of the masses dispossessed by the
forces of globalisation and self-serving political classes; demagogues that are
full of arrogance but short of substance, leading entire nations to ruin. If
this sounds like what’s happening in Britain, across Europe and the United
States these days, that is because they are deeply connected.

The last time so many calamitous trends converged
at once, it took the destruction of two world wars to reset things. We might
still avoid such meltdown, but for that, the dejected millions in those
countries that have yet to pass the point of no return must shake their torpor
and realise that their fate – and salvation – is tied to those who have lost everything.
The seas are rough, we have one boat and it needs fixing.