Ankara blasts may serve geopolitical angle: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Joaquin Flores, with the Center for Syncretic Studies in Belgrade, to discuss the recent twin blasts in the center of Turkey’s capital, Ankara.

What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: What do you make of the situation that is unfolding in Turkey at the moment?

Flores: Well of course there are a number of ways to look at the situation. It is quite obviously a tragedy and quite obviously the immediate, most devastating consequences that will be felt politically, these ramifications will be the intended ones.

So once we look at this from the perspective of obvious and known intended consequences, we can begin to look at all of the circumstantial evidence. I think that when we look at the circumstantial evidence, we look of course primarily at who could be the perpetrators behind this, we look at cui bono, it would be very strange and I think actually problematic I think that it is not credible the claims that the Turkish government is now making, pointing the finger at a wide array of various different groups which all of course oppose the Turkish government with the exception of ISIS (Daesh) and to say that this could be Kurds bombing Kurds or that this could be the Workers’ Party or the Communist Party or that this could be any other group, it really does not further the aims of these groups.

Any of these groups of course have their primary gripe with the Turkish government and not so much at each other. So just on the face of it when we look at who could have [fueled up] the attack, who has said previously that they would be open to doing such a thing, we have on tape, we have published already in public view that the head of Turkish security said that they would be willing to do some sort of operation to then blame it on their opponents. In previous cases it would have been the Syrians. In this case it looks like they want to use ISIS as a pretext to of course inflict more harm on Syrians and Kurdish Syrians. So that seems to be the assessment at the time being that the Turkish government I think is unfortunately the number one suspect and we should begin to first deconstruct  it from there.   

Press TV: What do you think, what agenda is the Turkish government following in actually carrying out these kinds of attacks?  Do you think it is an attempt to dissuade the Kurdish population from voting their politicians into parliament and kind of expanding their grip on power?

Flores: Yes absolutely. The thing about these sorts of staged terrorist attacks that are carried out by governments against their own people is that it serves multiple purposes. There is domestic angle, you mentioned elections, I think it certainly has a huge silencing effect on the local Kurdish population. Of course why would they turn out again for a protest to voice their opinions to establish a platform to obtain further rights? They are a persecuted minority in Turkey, so why not silence them?

Secondly of course if the government can blame ISIS, then they can say, that of course in a quite cynically, and I have to say it is beyond cynical that they would be protecting Kurds and that they would then start to get into an active campaign in Syria to bomb ISIS which of course would mean probably bombing more Kurds from reports and what we have been able to establish so far and then in the context of recent so far unverified and perhaps false reports of problems between the Russian air force and Turkish surface to air control, it looks like a recipe for problems. They may be looking for an angle to get further entangled in Syria more so than they have, more overtly and more officially. So this sort of major, major attack is a crime against the population but also it may serve a geopolitical angle as well.  

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