Ο τούρκος Assad

Ερντογάν :  "Ο ηγέτης που σκοτώνει το λαό του έχει χάσει τη νομιμότητά του"  Χμμ
ISTANBUL — Which is scarier: a government that hunts down and kills dozens in cold blood, or a government that hunts down and kills dozens by accident?

Left, Reuters; Jamal Nasrallah/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLeft, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey; President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

On Thursday, Turkey admitted to being the second type of government, just as over the last few months Syria has demonstrated itself conclusively to be the first. Turkey’s mistake, which it acknowledged sheepishly, was to launch air-strikes on Wednesday against about 35 men hiking along unmarked trails between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turkish military says it thought the men were terrorist members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.). But evidence found near the corpses suggested a more benign activity: the men were smugglers evading onerous Turkish and Iraqi customs duties on diesel and tobacco at the official crossing point of Habur. They carried Kools, not Kalashnikovs.

In the past, Turkey’s Kurds have responded to incidents like this one by protesting in the streets and public squares, with a little bit of armed struggle from actual terrorists on the side. Last night in Istanbul, Kurds and their allies went to the streets. On Istliklal Avenue, in Beyoglu district in central Istanbul, at street corners normally reserved for upper-class shoppers in winter chic, riot police stood huffing into their hands to chase away the cold, waiting for violence that never came. But news agencies reported that in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, crowds threw stones and Molotov cocktails, and stores were shuttered for the day.

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