It is not that nothing is being done to shed light on the incident; administrative and judicial investigations continue. But the investigation process is turning out to be quite slow, as it has already been five months since the incident. It is almost half a year and we are still at the point where we started, says the Zaman daily’s Mustafa Ünal. The Uludere incident is surely an extraordinary one as it happened right after a National Security Council (MGK) meeting in which the main agenda was the fight against terrorism and it is known that strategic plans were discussed during the meeting. To Ünal, the fact that such a “mistake” happened at a moment of intense, coordinated planning renders the claim that it was accidental suspicious. The timing of the incident is suspicious in itself, yet it is even more suspicious that we still don’t know if the attack was a mistake, if the military acted upon false intelligence -- as it argues -- and if so, which source gave the false intelligence. It is perfectly normal for us to expect the government to be extraordinarily sensitive and careful in this extraordinary issue, Ünal says.
Yeni Şafak’s Abdülkadir Selvi thinks similarly to Ünal, saying that the Uludere incident is a highly sensitive issue because it happened at a time when we were filled with hope and trust of the judiciary and we truly believed that the terrorism problem would finally be solved soon. Today, as we get more tired of hearing different and even contradictory explanations from various sources, the Uludere incident has become a sore point for us and we will not be at ease until light is truly shed on it.
“The government is struggling to get out of this Uludere swamp, but struggling only makes it harder to get out of the swamp,” Cengiz Çandar says, arguing that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s efforts to justify the state’s actions in the Uludere incident without giving solid and explicit explanations only make the public’s pain worse. This swamp is constituted by the blood of 34 innocent people and the teardrops of us all. And the public’s conscience will not let the state get out of this swamp easily. It can get out of this swamp only by drying it up with diligence and respect.
