Mick Hartley

Ece Temelkuran on the nationalist fever being whipped up in Turkey:

Recently, a couple of high school students sliced their fingers and made themselves bleed on purpose. They used their blood to paint a Turkish flag. It wasn’t a small one, either. They framed the picture and sent it to the chief of military. He cried when he received the “bloody mail”; and reporters were there to witness and report about the sacred flag.

The story of the bleeding didn’t end there, though. A few days ago, a conservative and nationalist newpaper (Tercüman) decided to print the picture of the flag drawn with children’s blood. And so the blood multiplied as the circulation of the newspaper increased.

If this doesn’t seem strange at first, a bit of perspective soon allows you to see the apocalyptic scenery here, which resembles Bosch’s paintings of hell. And you realise that the apocalypse started when our friend the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot. He was shot a year ago this week, and a Hollywood-like series of events ensued. People who were touched by the horrible incident were on streets, thousands of them shouting the slogan: “We are all Armenian, We are all Hrant Dink.” The slogan touched the weakest link in Turkish nationalism and a counter-slogan by the established writers and prominent opinion leaders was brought to the public stage: “We are all Turks!”

After a little while we understood what this contrived crisis was about. The army, together with AKP, decided to carry out a big campaign against PKK. The war began. The news bulletins immediately took on the appearance of Fox TV during the Iraq invasion. “We” was the subject, “cleaning” was the verb and the targeted object was always “them”, as if Kurds don’t live in Turkey. As if the militants of PKK who are bombed don’t have relatives in the Kurdish part of Turkey. But who would dare to ask such questions when the streets were strewn with flags and the nationalist gangs were made out to be the “legitimate” ones?