Terror in Turkey

The Ankara bombing shows how its President’s ambition and Syria’s civil war are pulling the country towards chaos

The killing by suicide bombers of more than 100 demonstrators at a peace rally in Ankara on Saturday is an ugly and ominous development in a country that was thought until recently to have a strong claim to becoming the European Union’s first Muslim-majority member state.

The attack targeted a demonstration organised in part by the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), the left-leaning, largely Kurdish party whose stunning success in the June general election thwarted the ambition of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He had planned constitutional changes that would have allowed him to rule as an all-powerful, executive president, rather like Vladimir Putin.

Instead, his Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002. The result has been a long, debilitating deadlock: no party has succeeded in forming a coalition government, and meanwhile the long-dormant war of the Turkish military against the PKK, the Kurdish separatists in the south-east, has broken out again.

Survivors of Saturday’s atrocity wasted no time blaming the government for the attacks, for having failed to put any security measures in place before the rally. The government fiercely rejects such claims, but by firing tear gas at relatives of victims seeking information about the dead and wounded it compounded the impression that it was, at the very least, uncaring and, at worst, regarded them as enemies of the state. The failure in recent months to take action against those who attack HDP offices and newspapers hostile to the government is, for the embattled Kurdish population, another sign that Mr Erdogan regards them as the enemy within, who can no longer depend upon the good offices of the state for protection.

This ugly mood has taken a grip three weeks before the general election and strengthens the impression that, after years of remarkable economic success, Turkey under its charismatic and ambitious leader is now in dangerous and uncharted territory.

In the election, Mr Erdogan hopes to reverse the June result and resume his march towards maximum executive power. But while callous disregard towards Kurds may enthuse his core support, it is likely to alienate those integrated Kurds who were until recently his supporters, and drive them into the arms of the HDP. The result, against a background of intensifying asymmetrical warfare in the south-east, is likely to be increased political instability and an acceleration of Turkey’s dangerous ethnic and political polarisation.

This huge, prosperous and cultured country, which is doing a magnificent job of hosting some two million refugees, is thus on the way to becoming yet another victim of Syria’s civil war. And although Mr Erdogan piloted the nation skilfully through the years of peace, the challenges of war and regional instability have brought out the worst in him. In the past four years he has made one serious political blunder after another. Each has driven his country further into a corner. The ultimate beneficiaries of this are Isis and other Islamists for whom another state on the road to failure presents limitless opportunities for bloody mayhem.

That is why the world must get its act together on Syria. Of course, Isis and its kin must be destroyed: no peace will be possible until that happens. But Syria’s civil war is in the process, as we see now in Turkey, of provoking one collateral disaster after another. Before the entire region unravels, with consequences that do not bear thinking about, it is time for the diplomats to roll up their sleeves.