by Mehmet Rami
And he’s right. Ataturk Airport, the 11th largest air travel hub of the world, is a well-guarded place: One has to pass through X-Ray security before one can even enter either departures or arrivals. If its security personnel are not always the most courteous, they are surely thorough. I know this from personal experience, from the many times of being asked to remove plastic water bottles or napkins from my person, from the time a guard made me remove everything in my suitcase to inspect a sharpish corkscrew buried deep inside. Staff remove abandoned suitcases diligently, and there is an additional level of security between the check-in area and the actual gates—and I’ve seen an occasional third level at gates themselves. There is no security gap as far as standard airport procedure goes.
But none of this is good enough when someone takes a cab to the airport as one might in any other place in the world, walks up to the said X-Ray security point, blows himself up in it, and then two other terrorists proceed to rush in and rain bullets with AK-47s on whoever’s survived the first blast and then blow themselves up in turn—which is what happened in Istanbul on Monday. The fact that this sort of thing can happen in broad daylight, that such a well-organized attack be planned, secured the supplies for, and executed, does not point out to a “security gap” at an airport—it means your country itself is a “security gap”.
And that is exactly the case with Turkey. It is a security gap. All of it. Make no mistake—Tuesday’s tragedy is no isolated incident, it is not a thing without precedent or one that would be inconceivable in the future. In fact, ask any citizen of Turkey whether they think this will be the only, or even the most severe, terrorist attack that they expect their country to endure in the near future, and you are certain to get the answer “No.” That is because Turkish citizens have been witnessing a catastrophic spectacle of terror recently—Turkey gave 290 lives to bomb attacks in the past year only, with another 1589 injured. These attacks have hit areas as diverse as the heart of Istanbul’s Old City to a political rally in Diyarbakir. Al Jazeera even has a fancy interactive “Attacks in Turkey” timeline/map now.
If there is anything more disturbing than this trend of chaos and violence in the country, it is the Turkish government’s reaction to —and its attempts to reshape the perceptions of— such tragedies. “No security gap” was exactly what Yildirim had claimed after a mortar attack to Istanbul’s other airport last December. How can someone be prevented from pointing a mortar gun and firing it in a city as vast as Istanbul, right? Interior Minister Selami Yildirim, too, spoke adamantly of this “no security gap” after a suicide bomber took 86 lives in Ankara last October. There was a security checkpoint in the area; but the attacker had chosen an area where targeted demonstrators gathered before heading there—what could be done? Turkey’s President Erdogan himself made the crowning remark after another attack in Istanbul that “We are in deep mourning—but everything has a cost.”
This attitude is poison because it is aimed to hollow out the notion of “security” of any actual meaning. The terrorist attacks keep happening with alarming, terrifying regularity; but if you listen to the authorities, there never is a “security gap”. “Security”, as the Turkish government is trying to present it, then, is always in place; but it doesn’t really matter that “security” is in place, for “security” in this equation is something with severe, unchangeable limits to begin with. In other words, in Erdogan’s words, if you lose a loved one to a terrorist attack or live every day with the fear of doing so, that isn’t because the agencies responsible to provide you with security are failing you—it is because terror and death are inevitable, unstoppable, stronger than the very notion of security.
This rebranding of “security” doesn’t just allow the Turkish government to represent its own failures for inevitable realities—it also takes the Turkish people for fools. Contemporary terrorism doesn’t work by making use of singular “security gap”s. You cannot fortify an airport or a train station or a public square to the point that it is somehow terrorism-proof. Organizations like Daesh make use of the ebbs and flows of life, of the natural ways people flow and congregate in space, of time and how people move through it. These are not “gaps” that can be filled. The responsibility of the state in today’s world is to properly collect and utilize intelligence, to crack down upon terror cells and plots before they are activated, to keep its borders under control, to value and educate its citizens so that they will not be lured by terrorist organizations, to engage in intelligent diplomacy. That is security—something the Turkish government has been failing at for years with porous borders, with an ever-increasing number of domestic recruits, intelligence oversights, administrative failures, bizarre flirtations with organizations like al-Nusra and, according to some, for a while with Daesh itself.
To assert otherwise as the Turkish government does, to force people to think in terms of simple “security gap”s that neither mean anything nor are a truthful way of looking at terror and safety, is a terrible, terrible thing to do. It turns a country into a habitat for fear, it feeds paranoia and fatalism, it normalizes violence and death—the exact things that a terrorist organization like Daesh feasts on.
And what for? To give the Turkish government an easy way out—out of taking responsibility for what happens in the country, out of actually working for its security—a sweet way out of its primary purpose of governing.
“Security” doesn’t really mean security, or much, or anything in particular, in the Republic of Turkey these days. If this is to change, if we are not buried too deeply into the perverse fairytale of “security” that our government has been spoon-feeding us, we as Turkish citizens will have to assert that our government be much more diligent and truthful—for Tuesday’s tragedy shows that it isn’t much of either at the moment.
Only if we do this will our leaders perhaps stop standing at a site where terrorists have just butchered dozens of people, right in front of the blood and the filth and the wreckage that is yet to even be cleaned, and tell us that everything is fine, everybody’s safe.