The finger points at PKK

The district of Istanbul where the two bombs went off, Gungoren, is its poorest. Twenty-five years ago, its population amounted to a few thousand. Then, in the 1970s, there was a demographic explosion, Turkey adding the population of Denmark to herself every year, and there was huge migration to the cities, especially Istanbul.

Now Gungoren contains well over 300,000 souls. The area contains a great many Kurds, who have escaped from the poverty of their part of Turkey, in the south-east, arriving by bus to live with relatives. Why on Earth would anyone want to explode bombs in that part of town, rather than in one of the plusher parts on the European side of the city?

No-one as yet has claimed responsibility, but this monstrosity does bear the stamp of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Kurdish rebel group that has been waging an armed struggle against Turkey and that claims to speak for the Kurds. It is the last major Maoist organisation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it took over a good part of the Turkish south-east, and specialised in making much of it unworkable, sadistically shooting the pregnant wife of a school teacher, attacking the security forces or even livestock.

Then the Turks learned how to deal with the PKK, even capturing its leader Abdullah Ocalan (who then denounced its works). For the PKK, getting at one of the richer parts of Istanbul would be difficult, because there are police and security checks. Killing and wounding up to 200 in a poor part of town is far easier.

Revenge

The PKK are out for revenge because they have been isolated and are now being heavily damaged in their bases on the border with northern Iraq.

The politics of "Kurdistan" are complicated. One of the two chieftains of Iraqi Kurdistan, Mesut Barzani, had ambitions to be the leader of all Kurds and he was allegedly using the PKK until a few months ago, giving them bases, and letting them use high-level intelligence, derived from his American patrons, as to which units of the Turkish army might be attacked.

The Americans withdrew support, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has recently been co-operating closely with Barzani's rival, Celal Talabani, the leader of the other great tribal federation in those parts. Oil is, incidentally, also at stake.

In Kurdish Turkey you can see the awful headaches brought about by the twin problems of terrorism and poverty, with 40 people sometimes living from a single wage and children running around in near-rags. These children can be easy pickings for PKK recruiters and as they grow up they are taught to hate the state.

It is a dreadful problem for Turkey, because it swamps the entire infrastructure and for many Kurds the only answer is migration to an over-crowded place like Gungoren.

Is there an answer to it all? Probably, through the cross-border co-operation with the Iraqi Kurds. But the PKK has to go first.

Professor Norman Stone is the director of the Russian-Turkish Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.