Turkey:
The population is victim of bombings

Dec 1, 2003

In Istanbul, Turkey, 26 people were killed and another 300 wounded November 15 in an attack against two synagogues. Five days later, additional suicide attacks against the English consulate and the headquarters of a British bank called HSBC killed another 32 people and wounded 450 more, for the most part workers and employees at the bank and consulate.

At the beginning the attacks were attributed to al-Qaida, and then to various fundamentalist Turkish groups which aid al-Qaida, like the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders Front or Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, which is implanted in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, was used in the 1990s by the Turkish state to assassinate militants of the PKK, a Kurdish nationalist group which was waging an armed struggle for national liberation. Proof that the Turkish state used Hezbollah was found in January 2000, when it turned out that weapons taken from Hezbollah had serial numbers issued to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior. In addition, an ID from the Turkish secret service was found in the possession of a leader of the military wing of Hezbollah when he was arrested in 1996.

In fact, the Turkish state has a long history of such practices. In the 1960s and 70s, it used terrorists coming from all sorts of fundamentalist groups against the Kurds, against the working class and against the communist movement. It's similar to what happened with the U.S. and bin Laden. During the 1980s the U.S. armed and supported bin Laden against the Soviet Union during its war on Afghanistan. Like bin Laden, the Islamic fundamentalists armed and aided by the Turkish government are using what they got from the Turkish state yesterday to play their own game today.

It is obvious that whichever terrorist group or groups are behind these attacks, the victims of which are usually workers, their aims surely do not defend social justice. In fact they dream of establishing a reactionary regime, like that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, where women and workers will be pushed back to the level of slaves.

The population in general and especially the workers cannot count on the Turkish state in any way to defend them against this type of attack. All the more so since the Turkish state is obviously already trying to use these attacks to increase its repressive practices.