The Ankara Massacre and the State as a Serial Killer in Erdogan’s Turkey
by Emrah Yildiv
Jadaliyya, October 12, 2015
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/22899/the-ankara-massacre-and-the-state-as-a-serial-kill
Shortly after the news of the Ankara massacre started circulating on social
media, a video surfaced, showing the very moment of the first explosion,
foregrounded by a group of young peace rally participants on a line of
halay. The protesters were singing and dancing to prominent ozan Ruhi Su’s
"Ellerinde Pankartlar," composed to commemorate the bloody May 1 Labor Day
celebrations in Taksim Square in 1977--when at least 42 people were
massacred and more than 120 people were injured. When the first bomb goes
off in the video, the halay group is about to utter those famous lines "this
Meydan is a bloody meydan." The bombs don’t allow that elegy to continue.
The police who come after them don’t allow that elegy to continue. The press
releases after them don’t allow that elegy to continue. As Selahattin
Demirtas, the co-president of the HDP (People’s Democratic Party) maintains,
the Ankara Massacre perpetuators, by commission and omission, will be
brought to justice, and Erdogan’s state will be declared a criminal serial
killer, as it already conducts itself domestically as well as regionally.
And that Ruhi Su elegy will be sung to completion here, from the top:
Ellerinde Pankartlar Banners in their Hands
Gidiyor Bu Cocuklar These youth, off they go
Kalkin Ayaga, Kalkin Get on your feet, Stand up
Gidiyor Bu Cocuklar These youth, off they go
Bu Pazar, Kanli Pazar This Sunday, the Bloody Sunday
Dert Yazar, Derman Yazar It afflicts grievance, it provides remedy
Kalkin Ayaga, Kalkin Get on your feet, Stand up
Gidiyor Bu Cocuklar These youth, off they go
Bu Meydan Kanli Meydan This Square, the Bloody Square
Ok Firladi Cikti Yaydan The arrow has sprung out of the bow
Kalkin Ayaga, Kalkin Get up on your feet, Stand up
Biz Sehirden, Siz Koyden We from the city, you from the village
With the imposition of a media blackout on all reporting about the Ankara
Massacre, Erdogan and his puppet Davutoglu administration might be devising
another crafty plan to manage this atrocity. I simply join tens of thousands
of people in streets of Turkey as they demand that Erdogan and his entourage
be held accountable for the biggest massacre targeting a group of peaceful
demonstrators in the modern history of Turkey. It is precisely the ordinary
people of Turkey who are hurting, and they demand justice in the face of
lawless mafia executions of Kurds, Alevis, leftists, and any other
self-identified dissident factions that stand together in opposition to an
increasingly callous and criminal authoritarian regime. And against all odds
they want peace. If these people are calling for peace despite everything
that has transpired, this call deserves a reply of solidarity and critical
coverage, particularly in English-language media. And the Turkish state
needs to be exposed for what it is in light of six massacres of massive
proportions over the course of their "rule": a criminal serial killer. Since
the June 7 Elections, the total death toll in Turkey: 694 people.
First and foremost, with this piece I want to report on the Ankara Massacre
in Turkey as immediately as possible. My second aim here is an analytical
one--taking seriously Selahattin Demirtas’ apt description, I approach the
state in Erdogan’s Turkey as a serial killer, which most aptly captures
another subcontracted part of the Turkish state. I have previously explored
the corporate-state and its outsourcing and subcontracting capitalism in
Turkey in the context of the Soma Massacre. In light of Suruc and now
Ankara, here I want to insist that the corporate-state under Erdogan relies
on not only taseron capitalism, but also taseron governance and
sovereignty--as it subcontracts the very practice of violence itself to
third-party groups within its own territory and logistically supporting them
outside it, be they nationalist-fascists or Islamist fascists. Committing
such massacres on such a massive scale and creating the conditions of direct
targeting of its ordinary citizens, while using their basic rights of
assembly to call for peace (!), cannot be a method of rule for Erdogan’s
Turkey anymore. This taseron state must cease its rogue practices and the
deregulation of not only labor safety in the economy, but also public
security for all of its citizenry. It is the twin fabrication and violent
enforcement of precarity within the realm of the economy and marginality
within that of politics that fuel Erdogan’s state of atrocities. This is why
the deployment of "fascist" as a qualifier of this state in its current
conjuncture is not an exaggeration.
As I write this piece in the immediate aftermath of the Ankara Massacre,
more than 500 civilians remain wounded, some in critical condition. The
numbers of casualties have risen from 86 when the news first broke out on
Saturday to 128 on Sunday during the drafting of this piece. They had
gathered, on the initiative of a number of workers’ syndicates (KESK and
DISK), trade unions, and labor organizations, calling for the immediate
resumption of peace talks between the armed wing of the Kurdish Liberation
movement and the Turkish state. They had gathered for "Labor, Peace and
Democracy," as called for by the title of the gathering. They were calling
for an immediate end to the systematic state violence that put entire
villages and towns under military curfew in Turkey’s Kurdistan for the past
two months. The explosions came just hours before the news spread that the
PKK-KCK was finalizing a plan of inaction ("eylemsizlik" in Turkish), which
effectively amounted to a ceasefire.
Yet another day punctuated by yet another massacre in Turkey. 10 October
2015: synchronized twin bombs, smuggled into a peace rally by suicide
bombers, next to the central train station in its capital, claimed more than
128 lives. They were 128 lives of the most courageous and selfless of
workers, labor organizers and university students, HDP representatives and
supporters, who wanted to stand in solidarity and call for peace and
political engagement in the face of the rhetorical and visceral
war-mongering that has in recently months taken Turkey’s Kurdistan and the
rest of the country hostage. Despite the lethal environment of lynching and
pogroms that have once again become everyday acts for Turkey’s Kurdish
citizens, they were there to call for peace, not more violence. As much, let
me reiterate what has already become one of the slogans of protest in the
immediate aftermath of the Ankara massacre: "We know the murderers. We will
resist against fascist attacks and massacres!"
Witnesses have reported that police forces, absent at the time of the
explosion, arrived immediately after the explosions. They got there before
the ambulances. Instead of helping the victims, however, the police chose to
attack those helping the wounded, using tear gas and pressurized water, and
refusing to create a corridor for health workers to enter the scene of the
massacre and help those who needed medical attention the most. That is the
primary reason why the numbers of the deceased are expected to rise in the
coming hours and days.
Just to be clear, there is a critical mass in Turkey that makes these
connections themselves. The way that the testimony of a survivor of the
Ankara massacre has been circulating and taken up by others might be a case
in point. Ayhan Benli, the survivor, writes on his social media account,
"today we survived [the massacre] only ten meters from the explosion. I don’t
know whether to be thankful for my survival or be mourning for those who
died. But I do know one thing. The way the police shot gas canisters at us
while I was pressing against a wound to stop the bleeding of a wounded
person lying beside me, and the way the police hit the woman comrade next to
me with his baton... Those I know I will not forget. You too, don’t forget."
As the slogan had surfaced in the immediate aftermath of the Roboski
massacre, those enraged by the Ankara Massacre, calling for holding those
responsible accountable, responded by saying, "If we forget, let our hearts
dry up."
As if to add insult to injury, the Davutoglu administration released a
thirty-minute press statement after the attacks--which was devoted to
threats leveled against the HDP leadership and its base. No condemnation of
ISIS-affiliated cells was part of the statement. Instead, Prime Minister
Davutoglu made it public that the government had issued a court order to ban
the production, dissemination, and circulation of any news about, reporting
on, or analysis of the Ankara massacre in Turkish visual, print, and social
media while it remained under criminal investigation. It is against the
backdrop of this state-sanctioned and aggressively pursued media blackout on
the Ankara massacre that this piece is written. It is simply an ifsha piece,
one that calls out the real criminals: the profoundly incompetent Davutoglu
administration under the sultanic control of President Erdogan. The Turkish
state and its criminal acts have to be accounted for immediately. And the
responsible parties have to be held accountable.
During his visit to the KESK headquarters to offer his condolences to those
who have lost their loved ones, comrades, friends, and family members, HDP
Co-President Selahattin Demirtas declared that there will be a concerted
effort to proceed with a collective funeral and burials for those who have
been martyred in Ankara as soon as possible. This declaration came after his
description of the massacre in the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet. If one
constitutive element of Erdogan’s state is the speculative, subcontracted
and deregulated modality of managing the "economy," the other is
intensification of violence directed at Kurds and other oppositional forces
inside and outside its borders, while domestically the political security
itself is deregulated, rendering some political gatherings as open targets
for fascist attacks like the one in Ankara. Demirtas’ historic speech,
accessible with English subtitles here, testifies to the fact that Erdogan
is not very far from Assad himself by allowing extremists to kill peace
rally participants in their very own city, in front of the central train
station:
We will not allow you to become time and time again murderers of our people.
Everyday we die. We are dying: we are the soldiers. We are the police. Both
Kurds and Turks are us. It’s the sons and daughters of the poor folk who are
dying. You are not dying. We watch every day where your sons and daughters
are and what they are up to, we are dying. You and yours are not dying.
Hence it is you and not us who need to be held accountable. The state is
under your control, and you govern this country. You are responsible for
every death. And you will account for this. Our struggle won’t cease until
we bring you to justice, under an independent judiciary. We will not allow
you to commit massacres in this country so freely.
Despite the historical connections with longer trajectories of state
violence directed against the others of the Turkish state, Erdogan’s
"operational" mistakes in Roboski, "work accidents" in Soma, are now more
shamelessly unapologetic and defiantly dehumanizing. And the state under his
rule not only rents mines like in Soma, but also the Syria-Turkey and
Iraq-Turkey borders as in Reyhanli and Roboski and town squares like in
Suruc and Ankara to acts of violence as well as to capital accumulation. It
is labor and public safety both that are being under-regulated and opened up
for further negotiation. These political de-regulations of security and
protection are the reason behind the deaths of our 128 people in Ankara,
adding to an already horrifying number of deaths Turkey had to endure under
the Erdogan administration. From Roboski to Soma, Gezi to Reyhanli, and now
from Suruc to Ankara, the Erdogan administration’s list of atrocities are
described as passive calamities that befall the nation keeps growing and it
doesn’t seem to stop at Ankara for good. As Demirtas maintained above, no
form of taseron state practices should be allowed to continue. State
responsibility for corporate and criminal commission and omission cannot
remain shielded from view anymore. The serial killer cannot kill with such
ease anymore because again, only we are dying...
Acknowledgments
I. I am grateful for the generous feedback I have received from Anthony
Alessandrini, Asli Bali, and Elif Sari on earlier drafts of this piece.
If you prefer, email your comments to info@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.