The savage bomb attacks in Ankara on Saturday are clearly designed to upset the faltering peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). It is not clear who committed the outrage but the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, Selahattin Demirtas, has gone as far as to blame the state for the attack and has condemned the government as “murderers” and said it had blood on its hands. But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also condemned the attack as an act of terrorism and said it was “loathsome”.
What is clear is that the attack was designed to disrupt a rally demanding an end to the violence between the PKK, which represents the Kurdish separatist militants, and the Turkish government. Erdogan hopes to use the violence between the PKK and the state to rally voters to support him in the forthcoming November elections. But yesterday the PKK pledged to suspend all offensive actions, reverting to the 2013 ceasefire.
This welcome pledge by the PKK comes three weeks before a rerun of June’s inconclusive parliamentary elections, which failed to get Erdogan the majority he craved in order to rewrite the constitution to give himself more power as president. The surprise of the elections was the emergence of the moderate pro-Kurdish HDP, which attracted widespread support from non-Kurdish Turks who saw the party as the only way to restrain Erdogan’s constitutional Islamism, dangerously arrogant view of himself, and his dangerous readiness to support Islamist organisations operating in Turkey’s neighbouring countries.
Turkey has been resolutely secular since its foundation by Kamal Ataturk after the First World War, but it endured successive military dictatorships during which its liberal politicians were jailed and marginalised, leaving only the growing Islamist trend to challenge the generals. Erdogan is a committed Islamist, but so far has worked within the law and constitution. But his reinvention of the figurehead presidency into an executive role has thoroughly alarmed a large swath in Turkey, who are desperate to deny him absolute power.