Four possible explanations for the terrorist attack in Tokat
by
EMRE USLU

When the intelligence services were investigating the suicide attack in May 2007 in the Ulus district of Ankara, the attack on the military in İstanbul on Aug. 7, 2008, and the bombing of the AK Party office in İstanbul in December 2008, everyone was coming up with different scenarios. However, the reality was that the intelligence services discovered a group, its training processes and stage this terrorist organization -- Devrimci Karargah, a mixed organization comprising Kurdish nationalists and leftist radicals who received military training at the PKK camps in Kandil Mountains -- was at in organizing terrorist attacks. The truth was revealed when the police in İstanbul confronted the leader of the newly founded Devrimci Karargah organization in June of this year.

Firstly, given that the leftist terrorist organization, the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), lost its leader, Dursun Karataş, a year ago and is in the process of reorganizing, it could be possible that a group of former DHKP/C members have formed a new group and have begun organizing the terrorist attacks.

Secondly, the PKK has neither claimed responsibility nor denied its involvement in the attack. This leads us to put the PKK at the top of our list of suspects because, from time to time, we have seen the PKK remain silent when its members have ambushed military convoys or killed civilians. For instance, the PKK did not immediately claim responsibility when its members detonated a bomb in Diyarbakır killing five civilians and wounding 70 in January, 2008. Similarly, despite its self-declared ceasefire, a few hours before Gen. İlker Başbuğ’s press conference in 2008, the PKK ambushed a military convoy in Lice, killing nine soldiers but they did not claim responsibility. A few months later, Murat Karayılan acknowledged that it was members of the PKK who had been behind the killings of civilians in Diyarbakır. Karayılan also admitted that PKK militants were responsible for the Lice attack and stated that it had not been a centrally organized attack. This background on the PKK gives us an incentive to believe that the terrorist attack in Tokat could be the work of the terrorist PKK organization, but not one centrally planned by the top PKK leaders in northern Iraq.

The third possibility is the work of the “deep state.”  Given that the history of the fight against the PKK with the operation conducted by deep state operatives, it is, however, very rare for operatives of the deep state to target soldiers. Yet the Ergenekon investigation and the accusations made against it have frustrated its operatives. Recently, a Western observer shared his observations about the deep state operatives, who are “frustrated and anxiously waiting to see whether they could be the next in line to be investigated by the prosecutors.”  Such exactly may result with a radical decision to target few soldiers to reverse the direction of Turkey from liberal democracy. The fact that the famous deep state agents Ibrahim Sahin and controversial figure Col. Dursun Çiçek are from Reşadiye where the attack took place makes the situation more interesting.

An organized gathering?

In addition, the after effects of the event are also interesting. For instance, on the day of the soldiers’ memorial ceremony, middle and high school students did not go to school, they gathered in the center of Tokat to protest about the attack. One needs to question how these students communicated with each other and joined the ceremony. Was it a spontaneous reaction to what happened in their home city or was the gathering organized? More importantly, the university students in Tokat joined the memorial ceremony as well. Of course, in a setting such as this it is to be expected that there will be spontaneous reactions; however, in the case of Tokat’s university students, two students, Halil İbrahim Ulger and Burak Dincer, who are close to Turkish nationalist circles in Tokat, made a written request to the rector of the university asking for students to be allowed to join the memorial service. The rector decided to cancel all the examinations taking place that and close the university and students were encouraged to participate in the ceremony. The public needs to be vigilant as the event in Tokat could trigger further unrest; the people behind the organization of these events need to be monitored.