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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Oct. - 3 Nov. 1999 Issue No. 453 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Oct. - 3 Nov. 1999 Issue No. 453
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Study Special Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Speculation rife
By Gareth Jenkins
over 'sophisticated' bombingTens of thousands of Turks took to the streets of the Turkish capital Ankara on 23 October for the funeral of Ahmet Taner Kislali, one of the country's most outspoken secularists, who had been killed the previous Thursday when he accidentally detonated a bomb left on his car.
A 60-year-old professor of politics and former minister of culture, Kislali was well-known to the Turkish public from his frequent appearances on television and from his column in the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, from which he earned his reputation as a hardline secularist. In recent years, he had also won a new audience from writing a moving memoir about his first wife, who died in a car crash in 1987.
Kislali was killed on the morning of 21 October when he attempted to remove a booby-trapped bomb hidden in a plastic bag and left on the bonnet of his car outside his house in an Ankara suburb.
While no organisation has yet claimed responsibility, many Turks have been quick to blame radical Islamist groups, who had frequently threatened Kislali in the past. General Huseyin Kivrikoglu, Chief of Staff of Turkey's rigorously secular military, cut short an official visit to Romania in order to attend Kislali's funeral along with Turkish President Suleiman Demirel and Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.
General Kivrikoglu also ordered all officers not on duty to attend the funeral in uniform in a calculated demonstration of the military's determination to protect the country's secular traditions.
"Kislali was like a missionary for secularism," explained journalist Can Dundar, himself one of Kislali's former pupils. As Kislali's coffin, draped in the Turkish flag and strewn with blood-red carnations, wound its way through the crowds of mourners, many chanted "Turkey is secular, and secular it will remain." "God willing, they will get the message," said a high-ranking military source in a reference to Turkey's Islamist movement.
However, while there is little doubt that Kislali was targeted because of his secularist views, it is still unclear who killed him. "The bomb was a sophisticated device that can only have been prepared by a group, not by an individual," said a military source. On 24 October, the Turkish paper Hurriyet quoted a security official as claiming that other packages had previously been left on Kislali's car in what now appears to have been practice runs to test his reaction.
Thousands of Turks attended the funeral of prominent secular writer Ahmet Taner Kislali
(photo: AP)
But both the planning and execution of the bombing suggest a degree of sophistication beyond the capacities of Turkey's violent, but thus far amateurish, Islamist terrorist organisations, the largest of which is currently entangled in a bitter internal feud. Nor do either Kurdish separatists or Turkish leftist terrorist groups have a record of targeting intellectuals. Some secularists have already hinted that a foreign power may have been involved in the bombing, probably in collaboration with Turkish Islamists.
Kislali is the seventh secularist intellectual to be assassinated since 1990, the fourth by a bomb. None of the murders have ever been satisfactorily solved, although privately Turkish intelligence officials remain adamant that Islamist militants trained in Iran were responsible for at least two of the killings, charges Tehran has consistently denied.
Meanwhile Turkey's Islamists have also produced a conspiracy theory of their own. "Provocation!" was the headline in the hardline Islamist newspaper Akit the day after the killing, which the paper attributed to elements in the state security apparatus that it claimed were trying to discredit Islam.
Several Turkish Islamists have also noted that the assassination of Kislali came only a few days after the Ankara Public Prosecutor Nuh Mete Yuksel launched a midnight raid on the house of Merve Kavakci, the embattled would-be Islamist MP whose refusal to remove her headscarf has prevented her from taking her seat in parliament.
Yuksel's action, which he claimed was part of an investigation into statements Kavakci had allegedly made in the United States expressing her support for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, was roundly condemned by politicians from across the political spectrum, including Prime Minister Ecevit and President Demirel. However there has not been any indication of a relaxation of judicial pressure on Islamist groups as a result, and on 25 October, a court in Ankara froze the assets of 88 former leaders of the now-banned Islamist Welfare Party, including its former leader Necmettin Erbakan, while prosecutors investigated charges that they had misused party funds.
"The killing of Kislali and the incident involving Kavakci were both organised by the same forces," claimed Mehmet Kutlular, leader of the Nurcu religious sect, a religious group, who was himself recently taken into custody for allegedly claiming that the devastating 17 August earthquake in Turkey was "divine retribution for the secularist clampdown on the expression of religious sentiment in public life".
In the current climate, where everything can be believed but nothing really trusted, even the arrest of Kislali's killers would possibly be seen as yet another stage in an elaborate conspiracy theory, and one which can only intensify the already dangerous polarisation between Turkey's Islamists and secularists.
