“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”And those mornings when she wasn’t sure what was possible, improbable or merely plausible, she would open a Turkish newspaper where every other day brought suggestions of a new conspiracy. “I thought the Looking Glass world was topsy-turvy,” commented Alice, but it’s easier to make sense of the Jabberwocky than this.
And indeed anyone who might have thought it brillig that Abdullah Öcalan is languishing in prison for having been the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) should think again, according to a recent interview in Taraf with Hüseyin Yıldırım, a PKK activist turned lawyer, now living in Sweden. It’s as plain as the grin on the Cheshire Cat’s face. Öcalan is as squarely under the thumb of the deep state now as he had been for many years.
As to why it should be in the interests of anyone to ferment deadly terror we need only turn our attention to the neighborhood of the eastern Mediterranean province of Hatay, the scene of race riots between Turks and Kurds. We read reports that professional agitators employed within the ranks of a secret organization of the gendarmerie may have provoked the riots but might have even staged the bloody attack on a police vehicle which enflamed passions in the first place. It’s not just the police but government ministers -- including the minister of the interior -- warning us that the whole affair was not as straight forward as it seems. A rear reactionary guard is trying to stop Turkey from voting “yes” at the referendum to approve the constitutional reform package.
This was the same minister of the interior who more than hinted that a resurgence in PKK violence had been subcontracted not by the chaps in Ergenekon but by some foreign power not a million miles away from Israel. The reasoning is that Tel Aviv was trying to intimidate Turkey at the time of the Gaza flotilla incident, and if this strikes anyone as being an example of political expediency, then I have it on good authority that it probably is.
But then let’s look at Ankara’s tough stance towards Israel and the carrot of a nuclear swap deal it is waving towards Iran. On the surface it would look as if the government is engineering a significant reorientation of Turkish policy, setting out on a path independent of its Cold War allies. But look again (or listen to government-leaning think tanks) and you discover that Turkey is actually serving Western interests by successfully competing with Tehran for influence. It has adopted a populist stance to curry favor in the Arab street, not because it is cozying up to Tehran but to carry out a devious policy of containment.
Happily, the Turkish opposition takes a far more direct view of the world. Not for them a view of conspiracies within conspiracies and truth and falsehood sleeping in the same bed. Or as the Duchess in Wonderland once put it: “Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” That, I take it, is the sentiment behind the Republican People’s Party (CHP)’s accusation that Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt, while head of the armed forces back in 2007, connived with the current government. His plan was to feign an attack on the legitimacy of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in the certain knowledge that this would oblige them to call a snap election which it would then win by a handsome margin.
“Curious and curiouser,” cried Alice.
