Are they 1st class citizens?
If a similar earthquake happened in another part of Turkey people would be angry with the alleged slow flow of relief and they would display this by complaining but in Bingol people resorted to incredible violence that bordered on hatred.
The scenes were ugly to say the least. Violent clashes erupted between police and the local people over aid shortage…
Policemen had to fire into the air with automatic rifles after hundreds of protesters demanding more tents, food and water destroyed police cars and antipersonnel vehicles. The protestors stoned the governor’s office and it took a massive paramilitary force to restore some sort of calm in the city.
Kurdish youths were seen stoning police vehicles in the side streets of the city…
Some people will now say the clashes were provoked by the separatist terrorist organization PKK. They may be right. But if you create the conditions which the PKK can exploit can you blame the locals for this violence?
The government did the appropriate thing by firing the local police chief and installing new assistant governors from other cities to calm the locals and restore order. But there is much more the government has to do in the macro-level for the whole the region because Bingol showed that even a small spark can lead to a popular explosion.
In Bingol the people at least had some relief. In the northwestern industrial city of Adapazari which was devastated in the 1999 killer quake people were left without relief for days and out of anger marched in defiance of the security forces protesting the government. They were a much much bigger crowd than the one in Bingol and yet no violent incident occurred.
The people of southeastern Turkey feel abandoned. They saw the end of the terrorist campaign by the PKK after the capture of terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan and they felt now that this ordeal is over the state would show more affection to their region. But that did not happen. Successive governments promised relief but they were just token gestures and were more of a joke.
The poverty and backwardness in southeastern Turkey is growing. You can argue that there are similar places in many parts of Turkey which are equally poor and under privileged. But they are not in an area which has been hit by nearly 15 years of suffering and destruction because of a secessionist campaign. So the people in the region feel third class and want to be treated as first class. This is the challenge for the government.
