Gunmen went on the rampage, mowing down guests at what should have been a festive engagement celebration. Some 44 people died, including women, children and a toddler not yet 3 years old. The couple was among those who perished. Many of those killed were members of the same extended family. The village is one that had been forcibly evacuated during Turkey’s ongoing fight against Kurdish separatists and resettled with other Kurdish families whose men folk are on the government payroll to fight the insurgents. Turkish officials were quick to assert that the deadly incident had nothing to with this decades-long political conflict, but the result of a local grudge. Local people say they know who the attackers were: members of a branch of the family who had asked for the young woman’s hand and then been turned down. There was apparently a history of animosity between the family of the bride and those responsible for the attack, with stories of property disputes and girls being dishonored. The authorities arrived on the scene after plowing through the dust storms that swept upwards across the border and have now arrested and charged eight people, all apprehended with guns.
The sheer callousness of the bloodshed was unprecedented, even in a region of Turkey accustomed to the sound of guns. The west of Turkey often eyes its eastern provinces with condescending but still fascinated eyes. Television series, much in the manner of old-fashioned American Westerns, depict a cultural landscape dominated by tribal customs and a brittle sense of family honor. Cinema-goers have long been conditioned to accept that there is a whole race of wild men out East, their eyes easily befuddled by a primitive sense of revenge. Turks themselves -- no less than people abroad -- have come to regard violence inside the family and among neighbors as the result of some feudal code founded in the mists of time. There is almost a studied refusal to contextualize such deeds in the more familiar and contemporary guise of domestic violence, crimes of passion or gang warfare.
Certainly nothing on the television screens or recent history has prepared Turkey for Monday night’s horrific spectacle of gunmen with automatic weapons mowing down women, children and men at prayer. There is a natural tendency for people to avert their eyes and dismiss the horrific incident as some inhuman, inexplicable act. Yet just as the sociopathic rampage committed by two juveniles in Columbine seems to require some deeper sociological explanation, so too the engagement party massacre in Bilge demands some deeper understanding of the society from which they sprung. So while some point the finger at an ancient culture of blood feuds and revenge, the greater fear is that the bloody incident is part of an all too modern phenomenon, rooted in the violence of recent years.
“Wasn’t there any security at the party?” a television interviewer asked me in the grim aftermath. It was a naïve question because both the victims and the perpetrators were “security” -- members of a village guard system and both armed and entrusted by the state to keep order. There is no end of human rights reports that say that the village guards were given far too free a rein to brutalize the countryside they sought to control. Even so, it still comes as a shock that they used even more horrendous violence against their own kind. It is yet another dreadful example of how the methods used to suppress insurrection in the Southeast have spun wildly out of control.
One thing that must not be swept under the carpet is the grief of the villagers of Bilge. Many lives have already been destroyed. Those who survived must receive care and compassion from the nation at large.
