Turkey's Nationalists Threaten Inter-Communal Fighting
The peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has given raise to a nationalist backlash, writes Cengiz Candar.
To challenge the opposition nationalists, Turkey’s ever self-confident Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan alluded to the Ottoman eyalet system of semi-autonomous provinces and recalled that during the Ottoman era there were eyalets called Kurdistan and Lazistan.
Devlet Bahceli, the leader of Turkey’s arch-nationalist opposition Nationalist Action Party (MHP) that at times assumes a racist outlook, realized the message of reconciliation from imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan that was read to more than a million people at Diyarbakir on March 21 could lead to a peace process and add much to Erdogan’s credibility. He decided to counter the process by organizing a series of public meetings.
The first such meeting was at Bursa, the nation's fifth-biggest city, in front of an impressive crowd. It's true that not everyone in the crowd was from Bursa and they might have been bused in from different parts of the country to bolster the crowd's size. But MHP’s skill in mobilizing such large numbers of people cannot be overlooked.
Loud alarm bells rang when the crowd chanted, “Tell us to hit, we shall; tell us to die, we shall,” and Bahceli responded: “Time will come for that, too.”
