Turkey Toughs Out Terror

Turks are robust enough to react calmly to the threats from a break-away Kurdish group to turn the country into “hell” in an attempt to scare away foreign tourists and damage the economy. But it is nevertheless alarming that six bomb attacks have been carried out this week, killing three people and injuring scores of others, mostly British and other European holidaymakers, on the country’s popular Mediterranean coast.

These minor, if deadly, incidents are a far cry from the jihadist spectaculars of recent years, including the 2003 atrocities in Istanbul, and serve as a reminder that not all terrorists are Islamists. Bombing buses at the height of the summer season is a criminal way to attract attention and to intimidate. The right response is to carry on regardless.

Fighting terrorism is primarily about better intelligence and security, and, of course, doing what is possible to address root causes and motivations. The outlawed Kurdish Workers party (PKK) observed a five-year ceasefire after the 1999 capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who then regretted the long separatist insurgency. There have since been improvements to Kurdish rights as part of Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union. But there has not been enough investment in the impoverished (Kurdish) south-east. And sporadic attacks on the security forces have kept up an exodus to the cities and depressed the local economy -- a case of extremists hurting the interests of their own people. The bombers seem to be a PKK splinter group unhappy with Ocalan’s recantation.

Geography creates a further complication. Ankara claims that recent Kurdish attacks have been facilitated by the presence of PKK fighters across the border in northern Iraq and has been keeping up a stream of complaints to the government in Baghdad as well as to the United States military. The appointment of a senior American General, Joseph Ralston, to tackle this, is a sign that the Bush administration is getting serious about yet another of the unforeseen side-effects of the invasion of Iraq and that it has overcome residual irritation at Turkey’s wholly sensible refusal to provide it with bases at the time.

Talks on Turkey’s EU membership, which were fraught with difficulty long before they began, promise to be a long slog because of the country’s size, and, for far too many, because it is a Muslim (though constitutionally secular) country. Doubters should take note that by agreeing to send troops to the expanded United Nations monitoring force in south Lebanon, this NATO ally has again demonstrated that it is prepared to shoulder weighty international responsibilities.