Sep 22, 2015

Turkey’s collective memory is heavily burdened with state-provoked, politically motivated mob violence attempts against minority groups, colloquially described as "lynching." In recent weeks, hundreds of violent incidents have heralded the resurgence of the mob violence culture as the country’s climate grows more toxic by the day, with political actors fanning hatred and normalizing violence.

In Turkey’s near history, mobs targeted mainly Armenians, Syriacs, Jews, Greeks, Alevis and Kurds. As Tanil Bora, author of the book “Turkey’s Lynching Regime,” puts it, “When it comes to Alevis and Kurds, this has always been a ‘free shot’ area. The 'lynching' of leftists has always been permissible. Police and ‘sensitive citizens’ act on the basis of this knowledge.”

The latest target of the mobs are the Kurds again. As of Sept. 16, a Google search with the key words “lynching attempt” in Turkish produced some 78,800 results for the period since July 24, when Ankara resumed military operations against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), shattering the settlement process with the armed, outlawed group.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) — vilified by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since the run-up to the June 7 polls and always deemed an enemy by the Nationalist Action Party — has seen its offices vandalized, ransacked or torched. According to figures provided by the HDP media department, 128 party offices were attacked in the Sept. 6-11 period alone. Ordinary Kurds have not been spared either. Kurdish workers and bus passengers, Kurds speaking Kurdish in the street, and even tanned people mistaken for Kurds have been attacked and Kurdish-owned businesses vandalized.

Turkey’s past century has seen a series of pogroms and mob violence in which the state apparatus directly took part, acted as an instigator or conductor, or simply looked the other way. The 1915 Armenian genocide, the 1914-15 massacres that wiped Syriacs off this geographic area, the 1937-38 massacres of 13,000 Alevi Zazas in Dersim and the deportation of 12,000 others could be seen as planned actions of the state. But the 1934 pogroms in Thrace, which prompted the exodus of up to 15,000 Jews; the Sept. 6-7, 1955, Istanbul pogroms, which saw Greek, Jewish and Armenian properties ransacked; the 1978-80 massacres of Alevis in Maras, Sivas and Corum; and the 1993 torching of a hotel in Sivas in which 37 Alevi intellectuals perished are engraved in memory as the terrible deeds of frenzied mobs.