Campus activities are a barometer of social health

Caleb Laeur looks at the political scene in Turkey ahead of the general election in June.

Riot police outnumbered the several hundred Turkish nationalists – often called Bozkurtlar (“grey wolves”) or Ulkuculer (“idealists”) – that gathered last month at a seaside square in Istanbul. They came to mourn Fırat Yılmaz Çakıroglu, an undergraduate and leader of a Turkish nationalist party’s youth branch at a university in south-west Turkey. Çakıroglu was stabbed to death during a campus fight with student supporters of the Kurdish national movement.

Conspicuous in the crowd at the gathering was a young man wearing a leather jacket and a traditional scarf of the Kurdish national colours – red, yellow and green. That this was an incident waiting to happen was clear. The scene drove several points home.

First, the tension in Turkey – which is boosted by the top-to- bottom polarisation engineered by the government, controversial negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to end its 30-year insurgency and by the forces of the regional upheaval – is such that it fuels anti-democratic sentiments.

Thus, people easily suspected the worst and concluded that a man standing in a public place with identifying markers such as a scarf of Kurdish colours was nothing more than provocation.

Not only is such a perspective dangerous in itself, it facilitates acceptance of the government’s claims that sweeping police powers, which will include the power to “preventively detain” people, are required to maintain peace.

Second, Çakıroglu’s death highlights how worried people are for Turkey’s university campuses. Since his murder in Izmir, there have been clashes on campuses in Ankara and Istanbul. It was reported that Turkish nationalists had been arrested for the killing of a Kurdish college student in north-west Turkey.

Violence on Turkish campuses is not unprecedented; nor are the fault lines between the right-wing and nationalists, and the left-wing and Kurdish new. In fact, this enhances the sense of foreboding that campus killings generate.

In the 1970s, thousands of people were killed in political battles fought among student groups – often on university campuses – along similar lines.

Today’s Turkey is different from the Turkey of the 1970s – even the 1990s, which were marked by intense political violence. However, youth and student groups are suffering the way they suffered in the past. Take the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a starting point. So many young people have been killed in demonstrations, riots or political violence since then.

This phenomenon raises questions about leadership. Turkish nationalists and the Kurdish movement both follow the leads of an older generation. These leaders are of political parties represented in the Turkish parliament. As these parties gear up for what will be a highly contentious general election in June, they will have to fight to control their young people.

Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the National Action Party, has been, in some people’s estimation, a pillar of peace in recent years. Despite all the bad press he gets, he has been remarkably successful in keeping the party as well as the “grey wolves” under control and preventing the violence that marks the party’s troubling past.

However, there is a risk that the youth will get ahead of their leaders. A tragedy that took place last year was a reminder. The leaders of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which is affiliated with the PKK and which represents the Kurdish national movement in parliament, called for demonstrations against the government’s policy towards ISIL that seized Kobani. Protests led by young people turned deadly. The leaders could do little to bring the situation under control. For now, both sides are warning against provocations and traps.

That such warnings are now a key guarantor of peace as Turkey heads to elections is a measure of how precarious politics has become.

Caleb Lauer is a freelance journalist who covers Turkey