A guide to Turkish terrorism
Re: "Security expert suspects Turkic group The Grey's role in shrine bomb blast", Front page, August 26.
Yesterday’s excellent front-page article cast light on current suspicions and at the same time castigated all the trafficking in suspicions.
One of the best contemporary treatments of this issue was the novel “Snow” by Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. Set in northeastern Turkey, it depicts a world in which rumour is as real as fact, and as much damage is done by special effects as by explosions.
The fact that a shadowy Turkic group called the Grey Wolves might be behind the bombing of the Erawan Shrine needs careful consideration, and I would strongly recommend “Snow” as a primer on Turkish terrorism.
Pamuk opposes violence with his whole being, but lives in a part of the world where ethnic groups have for centuries been killing, torturing and displacing each other on a level most of us simply can’t imagine. Yazidiis feature in “Snow”, along with the Armenians, the Kurds and the Uighurs – and we need to know a whole lot more about them all.
The young Boston bombers were named Dzhohkar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Did we do any work on that? Did anyone know who those two boys were named after, and the mythic baggage they carried?
Christopher Woodman
