Let me put this recent killing of a European visitor to İstanbul into perspective: Murder happens everywhere, and when one takes the average annual fatality numbers for cities similar in size to London into account, we sadly record one fatality per day, without adding the traffic-related accidents. Do they make the headlines? Most of them do not. Put differently, one murder per day is unfortunately nothing to write home about any more. So what makes a sudden death in Turkey's financial capital any different?A country that was intellectually looking inward for so many decades despite its 8,333 kilometers of coastline suffered from the “we do not need foreigners, we are self-sufficient syndrome” and was prone to develop a subculture of promoting nationalism, which often turns violent. Besides, a subculture of inciting hatred against its very own people -- think about our many millions of citizens of Kurdish origin -- can easily mushroom into a general “anti-the-other” sentiment, which then transforms into criminal conduct against “foreign” foreigners.
It does not matter whether the tourist who was killed near İstanbul's Taksim Square was of German, Dutch, Venezuelan or any other ethnic origin. It does not really matter whether he had a Turkish girlfriend or not. It does not matter whether he was a banker or a backpacker. What matters is that the killing is a symptom of the ill-conceived promotion of one-race nationalism. The killer, while of course guilty, is not the real culprit: his peer group is; those who incite hatred in unsuspecting youths are. Now who could those people be? Certain circles in Turkey feed on headlines like these to deter foreign direct investment, incoming tourists and any other “non-white Turk.” Either these circles are extremely ill-informed or are in conflict with the law or perhaps both unless there is a third dimension. I will come back to this point.
I recently met one self-styled representative of one of these peer groups. Whenever someone tells me that he or she only talks to “educated” people and that Kurdish people have no education at all and that, by the way, previous military coups were a good thing, I start to worry.
There was a woman sitting in a neighborhood café. She was about 55 years old I reckon, perhaps a little bit younger or a year or two on top of my guesstimate. She was asking me questions about why foreigners have settled in a town I will refer to without giving away its location. She then kept on asking me about the actual numbers of foreigners in that town, only to happily confirm that no foreigners are allowed into her housing complex. Having mentioned to her that I write for an English-language newspaper, she changed tactics and invited me to visit her “sitesi” -- Turkish for a housing complex or compound -- as “you are an educated person.” Then I told her which paper I am affiliated with -- she had never heard of any English-language newspaper in Turkey. She then figured out that our newspaper must somehow be linked with the Zaman family, and her jaw dropped. She was busy talking on her cell phone with a person in İstanbul, or so she said, constantly complaining about the fact that now “the foreigners live where she lives.”
The third dimension I wrote about earlier on is that these people look as neat as a waitress in a posh İstanbul coffee shop and that is how you can spot them. They have a limited worldview and are at least passively supporting illegal activity -- the staging of a coup against a civilian government is a punishable offense indeed. They are, however, quite clever as far as they interpret it, are well versed with (Turkish) words and many of them attended a (private) Turkish institute of higher education or a university, or perhaps two.
What worries me most is that I detected exactly the same mindset in this smooth operator as was found in a more extreme and bizarre form in the İstiklal killer. In summary, it is a dislike leading to hatred of anything foreign. They are people who always wear the nicest clothes they can afford to; are often, but not always, past their biological sell-by date; and are financially well off. Their primary aim: reserving education for white Turks and calling every Kurdish citizen a liar or a terrorist. Now if these people had children, can you imagine what kind of mindset their children would have been brought up into? Hate breeds hate! Parents who loathe foreigners must face up to the consequences that perhaps one day their child will be in the news for all but the wrong reasons -- having committed another crime, if not murder, on İstiklal Caddesi.
Turkish civil society has matured and will not tolerate that any longer.
