Bleeding pictures from bayram

A huge panic erupted when a few days prior to bayram M.D., who went shopping for the coming religious holiday in the southeastern city of Gaziantep, yelled “I am a suicide bomber.” M.D. was nearly lynched when passersby realized after their initial shock that there was no such mechanism on his body. M.D. was saved by the police only after they started to shoot in the air to disperse the lynching crowd.

According to claims, M.D. was angry at the shopkeeper and that’s why he yelled “I am a suicide bomber.”
I don’t know what made him yell like that. Did he have a nervous breakdown or did he simply do something stupid? Still, I think the madness M.D. made people experience could be seen as an early warning sign.
Look at this incident: 41-year-old A.A. was just out of prison in southern Adana. He took his car to get around. When his brother stopped the car several times, he got angry, took a knife and stabbed him in the chest yelling, “Don’t you know how to drive a car?”

Killing for a painkiller

M.Ç., 22, who lives in Gaziantep, asked his 18-year-old brother F.Ç. to go to the pharmacy and get him some painkillers for his headache. When the answer he got was negative, he killed him with a knife he took from the kitchen.

Police officer E.K., working in İzmir Aliağa State Hospital, shot Y.Ç. dead when the latter, working in the same hospital as a security officer and who was also the head of youth branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in that province, accused the former of being a member of the Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETÖ).

A young man lost his life, just like that.

Mass explosions of violence

These are individual incidents. Unfortunately there are other dimensions to the spiral of violence involving large crowds, like the fight in Durağan village in the Black Sea province of Sinop for instance. The fight erupted over the price of a knife and got so large that additional security officers were called from nearby villages and measures were taken to the extent of declaring a curfew.

Officials are saying that the incident had no ethnic or political dimension, but the fact that the provincial head of three villages where Kurds are in the majority were dismissed raised question marks.
Fifteen people were wounded and a 16-year-old lost his life. 

In eastern Erzurum, a discussion that started between an uncle and a nephew over moving into an empty house turned into a fight that involved 100 people from the same family. The police had to call in additional forces, shoot into the air to disperse them and use teargas. The only cause for consolation is the fact that no one died in the incident. 

Terror is another trouble

There was also the heinous terror attack by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in eastern Van during the religious holiday which wounded 48 people. 

But the other ones that I am talking about are, and I am saying this with great sorrow, violence that we internalized and inflicted on our friends, relatives, neighbors, each other.

This is the picture of a Turkey so tense and in such a spiral of anger that it has forgotten to make peace, seek compromise even during bayram and endorsed a language of violence.

This is the picture of a society where a person has come to the point of killing a sibling just because of a mistake while driving or for some painkillers.

This is unfortunately the picture of us during the holiday season; a society which has surrendered to violence; a picture which is bleeding.

Something to think about.