Knowing how to mourn

Terror has shown its most treacherous, most murderous and most barbaric face in Ankara in recent times. The suicide bombs detonated among people gathering for a rally, aiming at the greatest possible number of deaths, targeted not merely the unity, integrity and peace of society, but, more importantly, its conscience, its moral sense, its balance, its common sense and its reason.

When the scale of terror and violence grows this large, the trauma it creates shatters every kind of moral yardstick and every faculty of reason in people. If terror has a function at all, this is it. It does not appeal to reason; it destroys reason. It does not appeal to conscience; it wounds and paralyzes conscience, turns it directly toward the most archaic emotions and detonates those emotions. What remains is masses that have lost their target, or that, under the traumatic hypnosis created by terror, plunge headlong at the target they are shown, without awareness.

Before us lie bodies, so young, brutally felled to the ground. Each of these bodies has set homes ablaze like embers from a fire, and there are mothers and fathers with burning hearts. That nobody cares about their pain, and that crowds of mobs nevertheless rush to collect the rents that fall to their share from this pain, presents a picture even graver than the pain of terror itself. It is the gradual decline of humanity, its debasement, and the fact that all of us as a society are becoming a part of it. This is the tragedy.

Mourning is an important opportunity to honor the dead, to share in the pain of their relatives and thereby to heal as a society; it is also a human state. Mourning is the right of the dead over those they leave behind. It is a way out of their pain for those whose hearts have been set on fire, through the participation of other hearts. Observing mourning properly is the first great answer to be given to terror, the one that will thwart its dark aims. Of course, every kind of justice, investigation, questioning and even reckoning process will be carried out afterward. But with reason, with conscience, with common sense, without losing composure and balance...

Those who try to reap political profit precisely from the dead, without paying the dead their due, take their places on the stage either as outright collaborators of terror or as ignoramuses whom terror has ensnared in its net. Is there a science of psychology that could analyze the feelings of Demirtaş, who, when no one had any idea at all about the nature of the incident, declared the perpetrators, the culprits, those behind it and those in front of it, and called the people into the streets?

Exactly one year ago, with the same lust, he poured people into the streets and was the first-degree person responsible for more than 50 lives falling to the ground; and his call to the streets now, using this incident as a pretext, is nothing but, in a single word, a disgusting opportunism. While conducting a politics so openly intertwined with terror in Turkey, he and the organization whose political representation he undertakes are perhaps the only ones who will not complain about terror. A call to the streets, with the corpses still lying there, that could cost other lives too, frankly leaves no need to look for another perpetrator of the incident.

Since July 23, the unfathomable calls, mobilizations, provocations, funerals, press statements... made to pour people into the streets with calls for self-defense, none of them served to bring people into the streets; they were not enough. But with the help of the atmosphere created by the bombs that exploded in front of Ankara Station and the high number of deaths, for the first time in a long while relatively higher-turnout demonstrations were organized in many provinces. At the insistence of the JPG, for the first time in a long while shutters could be pulled down in some places. The HDP can find the ground of activism it has lost only in such incidents. An atmosphere similar to the one caught with the pretext of Kobani has now been created. While its armed wing has declared a unilateral ceasefire, the political wing gives the instruction to terrorize the streets. Thus the HDP turns this savage massacre, in front of everyone's eyes, into an ugly political opportunity.

THE FIRST TO ACCUSE IS PART OF THE TERROR ACT

The known principle in the pursuit of crime: one reaches the culprit by starting from whom the incident benefits. This rule does not always work with the same effectiveness. After all, those who expect to benefit from an action, especially a criminal one, may also end up being the ones who suffer most from it, should the action yield results different from what they planned, or should they be caught.

The culprit's appearing in a different guise on the surface has to do with the nature and scope of the crime. To reach the desired goal, it is very important that the chosen operative, and even the subcontractor who employs the operative, not be random. These are not actions that can be understood only through the perpetrator's visible identity. Indeed, the visible identity of the perpetrators is chosen specifically in order to determine the targets of these actions. Today almost no one has any doubt about whom the Mersin, Adana and Diyarbakır attacks benefited. For this reason, no ambiguity remains as to who the Ankara Station attack, which was evidently carried out with the same logic, came from, or at least who it did not come from.

The stronger piece of evidence that gives away the identity of the attack is the accusations that came into play simultaneously with the attack. Within minutes of the news, when not a single piece of evidence about the incident had been collected, those who immediately reached a firm verdict about what was obviously an extremely sophisticated political massacre and named the culprit are undoubtedly part of the organization of this attack. Turkey in fact has countless experiences in this regard. In the past, political assassinations took on, in an exact division of labor, the management of the post-assassination atmosphere as well. So you can say this with ease: in such actions, watch who makes the accusation first. The probability that he is part of the crime is extremely high.