Veysel Demirtas, his face inexpressibly sad, picked through the gaping yaw of splintered wood and glass shards that was once his small restaurant across the street from the British Consulate in the historic heart of Istanbul. The 52-year-old owner of Evin Restaurant, ‘‘Your House,’’ gingerly extracted a few canned soft drinks, one by one, from a broken counter splattered with spoiling food and overturned crockery from Thursday’s suicide truck bomb explosion. ‘‘Maybe we can use these,’’ he said hopefully. He plucked a tomato from the debris. ‘‘Maybe this one.. We should find a refrigerator to put these in.’’ And then he paused, sensing the futility of his actions amid the enormity of his loss. ‘‘What are we trying to do?’’ he asked in a voice weak with despair. ‘‘What is left to save anyway?’’ In the aftermath of two double suicide truck bombings that have left a total of 58 people dead and 750 injured in attacks on two Jewish synagogues, the British consulate and a British bank headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey has become a bewildered nation uncertain of where to aim its anger and despair at becoming what President Bush labelled a new front for terrorism. Despite nagging economic problems and a troubled human rights record, Turkey has been heralded by many Western countries and admired by some Islamic nations as the model a progressive Muslim democracy. Now many Turks say they believe that the same attributes that won them accolades from the West have turned them into a target for extremist Islamic organisations. Many blame Bush for fomenting an upsurge in terrorism worldwide with the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Those opposed to the Islamist party that now governs this secular Muslim nation accuse their own government of intentionally ignoring the marriage of home-grown militancy with international terrorist organisations, such as Al-Qaeda or its associates. ‘‘Everybody’s hearts were burned at a time when Turkey was living happily and peacefully,’’ Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday after attending an emotional funeral for Kerem Yilmazer, 58, one of Turkey’s best-known theatre actors, who was killed while walking near the British HSBC bank headquarters Thursday when the truck bomb exploded. Some secularist leaders and commentators who oppose the Islamist government of Erdogan have accused the prime minister of largely ignoring the simmering problem of domestic fundamentalist Islamic youth who have fought or trained in Afghanistan, Iran, Bosnia or Chechnya and may have returned to Turkey with new connections to international terrorist organisations. Erdogan said on Saturday that the two bombers who blew up the British targets on Thursday were Turks, along with the two men who blew themselves up in trucks near two Jewish synagogues last Saturday.‘‘Everyone in the leadership has Islamic upbringings and political education,’’ said Cengiz Candar, a columnist for the Turkish daily newspaper Tercuman. ‘‘Secularist zealots who are very suspicious of the people in government say that because of this Islamic mindset, they might not have been very keen and alert to go after the kinds of people who committed these crimes.’’ The allegation he said, ‘‘is not totally untrue.’’ Mehmet Dulger, a member of the prime minister’s Justice and Development Party who heads the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said: ‘‘These kinds of operations are like earthquakes, they happen. No army in the world would be able to stop it.’’ Erdogan has a history of deep pro-Islamic ideology. When he was mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s commercial and cultural centre, in the mid-1990s, he banned alcohol in city-run restaurants and once declared, ‘‘One cannot be a secularist and a Muslim at the same time.’’ He has once was jailed for five months for ‘‘inciting hatred on the basis of religion’’ after he read a provocative poem at a political rally. He has since attempted to recast his political persona, and although strong secularists remain suspicious of his loyalties, many analysts say he has managed to create one of the most stable Turkish governments in recent years by strengthening the economy and maintaining a tenuous balance between secularist detractors and more fundamentalist Islamic groups. ‘‘When I look at these attacks I see only one explanation,’’ said Akif Beki, director of the television network Kanal 7. ‘‘What is going on Iraq. This is a punishment attack. They were planned when the Turkish parliament passed the bill to authorise Turkey’s government to send troops to Iraq.’’ Many Turks interviewed near the scenes of the past week’s bombings blamed Bush and the occupation in Iraq for inciting an increase in international terrorism, including the attacks in Istanbul. About 2,000 people participated in a peaceful march in downtown Istanbul on Saturday, protesting not only the actions of the terrorists and but also US involvement in Iraq. ‘‘Who else other than Bush is responsible for this?’’ said Idris Cimen, 45, who, swathed in an apron, attempted to hawk fish and shrimp to the few stragglers passing his stall on Friday three blocks from the British Consulate. ‘‘Every century a new evil comes to make trouble for humanity, and this is what we have now.’’ (LATWP)
