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	Thousands gather in Ankara to pay respects to activists killed in bombings by Guardian News, agencies Turkey   12 October 2015   Thousands gather in Ankara to pay respects to activists killed in bombings, by Kareem Shaheen in Ankara. (Guardian News)   Men and women wept openly and clapped as a casket covered in red carnations made its way through the crowd of thousands that had gathered in Ankara to pay their respects to activists killed in twin bombings during a peace rally on Saturday.   “We lost many beautiful people,” Ahmet said as tearful eulogies were given at a wake for labour activists in Ankara’s suburb of Batikent.   “I could not cry yesterday, I was in too much shock,” Mustafa said, tears now streaming from his eyes as he embraced a friend whose brother died in the blast.   At least 128 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded when two suspected suicide bombers targeted a peace rally organised by several leftist groups, including labour unions and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), to call for an end to the escalating violence between the Turkish government and the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s party (PKK).   The attack is the deadliest on Turkish soil in the country’s recent history.   “Thief and murderer, Erdogan,” chanted thousands of demonstrators gathered in Sihhiye Square in central Ankara at a midday rally.   Saturday’s twin bombings have brought to the fore divisions that have cleaved Turkey between supporters of the government of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), and supporters of the opposition movements that have gained ground in recent parliamentary elections.   They exposed deep-seated anger at the government, which demonstrators and mourners directly blamed for failing to protect the rally and which they accused of instigating chaos in order to secure a majority at snap elections scheduled for November.   The protests also highlighted simmering frustration at what many see as long-lasting discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities in the country, such as Kurds and Alevis, who alongside leftist activists featured prominently in the targeted peace rally.   “We now have 128 more bodies,” said Hasan, a Kurdish man who lost a nephew in the bombing while another was severely wounded. He was speaking outside Numune Hospital in central Ankara, where many families of victims as well as volunteers gathered after the attack.   Demonstrators, witnesses, victims’ families and opposition leaders widely condemned the government and in almost all interviews ascribed direct responsibility for the deaths at the feet of Erdogan, saying the police had failed to provide any security measures to protect the rally’s attendees and had even teargassed relatives of the victims as they arrived at the scene of the attack looking for their loved ones. They spoke under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals by the government.   Ahmet, who was at the funeral and survived the previous day’s blast, said security forces were completely absent in the lead-up to the rally. He said the police attacked those who arrived at the scene or tried to assist the victims with teargas, firing bullets into the air and sowing panic among the attendees.   He said AKP-sponsored rallies never suffered from attacks, while those organised by the opposition and the Kurds were not protected.   “In addition to pointing at the ones who did this, looking over the past year the ones who are targeted are the opposition, those who want peace, defenders of human rights and the democratic struggle in Turkey,” he said. “The government is trying to create new chaos and war, to renew their power by starting new wars.”   The peace rally had been meant as a call for an end to the violence that has gripped the country for months after a suicide bombing in the border province of Suruç that also targeted mainly Kurdish activists. Erdogan’s government, which blamed the attack on ISIS, used the bombing and its aftermath of small-scale violence as a pretext for a major crackdown on the PKK, risking enflaming a civil conflict that had largely been quelled after a long insurgency.   At the midday rally, protesters carried placards with photos of the victims, and organisers patted down attendees to prevent a recurrence of the previous day’s attack.   “We are grieving, we are saddened, but we are also furious,” said the Kurdish opposition leader Selahattin Demirtas, addressing the thousands-strong crowd. “We will struggle, fight, and win back the democracy.”   As the families of the dead marched through the crowds, some weeping in agony, the condemnations grew more furious.   “In the end, he [Erdogan] will be handcuffed, judged and imprisoned,” said Musa Cam, a senior MP in the opposition party, the Republican People’s party.   For others, the anger was far more muted. “We have had too much pain,” said Fatima, an artist who attended the rally condemning the government.   “I came to leave flowers and to share in the pain of the families. We must do something. We are sick of normalising death. We want to unite the people of Turkey.”   Attendees at the wake, which was held by an Alevi mosque to symbolise Turkish unity, also widely blamed Erdogan’s government for failing to protect the demonstrators, saying the country had become severely divided due to recent violence.   “When this government falls, we will have sunlight,” said one mourner. “We lost a lot of good, beautiful people.”   Oct. 2015   At least 95 people have been killed and some 250 wounded after two explosions targeted a peace rally in the centre of the Turkish capital.   Twin explosions outside Ankara’s main train station on Saturday morning targeted hundreds of people who had gathered for the peace march.   The area was to have hosted a peace rally calling for an end to the fighting between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish government.   "Many of the injured people are heavily injured, so there is a fear that the number of dead people may increase," said observers.   Witnesses said the two explosions happened seconds apart shortly after 10:00am (local time) as hundreds gathered for the planned "peace" march.   Several witnesses said ambulances could not immediately reach the scene of the attack, and that police obstructed the quick evacuation of the wounded from the square.   Asked at a press conference if he and other members of Justice and Development party should resign over the Ankara attack, interior minister Selami Altinok denied the obvious failures in security preparations for the planned peace rally.   The prime minister’s office banned media coverage of the attack, and Turkish police fired in the air to disperse demonstrators angered by the deaths of their fellow activists from the scene.   However, thousands of people later marched down Istanbul"s main central avenue to protest the attack.   Some carried placards reading "the state is a killer" and "we know the murderers", echoing allegations of state responsibility made in the aftermath of the attack. Protests were also taking place in several other Turkish cities.   The pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) one of the groups organising the peace rally, said in a statement that it had specifically been targeted. Several HDP members and parliamentary candidates are among the victims of the attack.   HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas said "like other terror attacks, the one at the Ankara train station targets our unity, togetherness, brotherhood and future".. "How is it possible that a state with such a strong intelligence network did not have prior information on the attack?"   He drew a parallel with the bombing of an HDP rally in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir on the eve of the last election in June and a suicide bombing blamed on Islamic State in the town of Suruc near the Syrian border in July, which killed 33 mostly young pro-Kurdish activists.   Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of the HDP party, added: “This attack is not targeting our state and national unity, it is perpetrated by the state against the people.”   Demirtas added that he did not expect that those responsible for the bombings would be brought to justice.   The attack comes with Turkey on edge ahead of November 1 polls and a wave of unrest over recent months. Fighting has only recently resumed between the authoritarian Islamist-based government and the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) after the collapse of a two-year ceasefire in July. http://bit.ly/1LDjtLp   http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/turkey-bomb-blasts-ankara-mourning-scores-killed Visit the related web page
	The World’s Fragmenting Conflicts by Jean-Marie Guéhenno International Crisis Group   Ignorance and indifference, not the great power rivalries and proxy conflicts of the Cold War, killed the victims of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. The accompanying massacres, refugee flows and destruction would have stood a far better chance of being prevented if intelligent policies had been proposed and backed by high-level advocacy. This gap was the principal impetus for the men and women who established the International Crisis Group in 1995.   The hope of our founders was that such massive policy failures would not happen again.   Indeed, politicians, diplomats, activists have often relied on Crisis Group over the last twenty years for detailed field-based analysis of complex situations and independent policy recommendations. There was for a while a significant decline in conflict, as the world got better at peacemaking and peacekeeping.   But here we are, with a war in Syria that has claimed a quarter million deaths and displaced some twelve million people from their homes; with the return of power politics and great power rivalry playing out in Ukraine, as well as in Syria, and, in different form, the South China Sea; and with a new transnational jihadist agenda that infects an increasing number of conflicts that were, at their inception, simpler local disputes.   The threat of big war is back, and new forms of violence, cyber-attacks, hybrid war, and terrorism with a global reach are redefining conflict.   They threaten to reverse the progress achieved since the end of the Cold War and challenge the legal order that emerged from World War II. At issue is not just that violent non-state actors threaten an international order based on the sovereignty of states. The problem is also that states themselves increasingly use force in situations that stretch or violate the UN founding principle that prohibits the use force except in cases of self-defence, or when the UN Security Council has authorised action in the interests of international peace and security.   Is the long-term trend toward more peace and less conflict at risk of being reversed?   Crisis Group’s answer must be that it is our responsibility to prove the pessimists wrong. War is never pre-ordained, it is always a manmade disaster. But we must all work to understand the new situation fully and adapt accordingly.   First, the nature of conflict is changing. It is not enough to say that there are more intra- than inter-state conflicts. In a world that is as much multi-layered as it is multipolar, conflict is also multilayered: most conflicts still have very local roots, but they are often manipulated by external powers or hijacked by transnational ideologies.   The world is no more the top-down strategic play that it often was during the Cold War, but it would be naïve to think that a purely bottom-up analysis can explain the complexities of recent conflicts. Ukraine is about Ukraine, and it is also about Russia, and about Russia and the West. Syria is about the Assad regime, but it is also about the rivalry between Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and about the spread of transnational jihadism.   States are losing their centrality as the theatre within which politics is played, and they compete with other actors, benevolent or malevolent, whose goals may not be confined within the borders of a particular country.   Second, let’s admit that when confronted with conflict and change, there is no such thing as an “international community”.   There never was, but there was the pretense, and that pretense was useful. Exposing hypocrisy can be the beginning of virtue, and the world’s thugs could sometimes be shamed into not blatantly challenging a working, if shallow, international consensus. This is no longer the case: established and emerging norms, as well as values that were still considered universal a decade ago, are now openly attacked as the props of an unfair order imposed by Western powers.   Indeed, a strong case can be made that Western powers have a significant share of responsibility for the unraveling of the international order: they launched a military operation in Iraq without the explicit authorisation of the UN Security Council, and they used the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect as cover for a policy of regime change in Libya. Both actions have had a disastrous aftermath.   Western powers lost moral authority as they were accused of double standards.   Russia is the most vocal, but not only, promoter of that view, as Moscow makes clear that the state of affairs that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union is a low point of Russian history that it wants to change.   While openly revisionist, Russia is also, not unlike China, a conservative power. It is wary of new norms that could provide a base for unseating established authorities that abuse their power. It considers that emerging doctrines such as the Responsibility to Protect are undermining the less ambitious rules agreed in 1945, which uphold the sovereignty of states. And it is opposed to revolutions that it always deems foreign-inspired.   On the other hand, Western powers question an international order in which sovereignty can shield a government committing mass violence against its own people, and they aspire to an order in which all governments are accountable.   In that sense, they are revolutionary powers, eager to promote change, if by peaceful means. But, worried about the loss of their post-1945 privileges, they too are conservative about sharing the high tables of international politics, such as the structure of the UN Security Council.   Most countries, those that are neither in a Russian, Chinese or broadly defined western camp, are trying to avoid being drawn into that debate, even on those occasions when they have sympathies for the values of which Western powers are now often the lonely champions. There is no agreement on the status quo, but there is no agreed framework to change it.   Where does that leave those like Crisis Group who are indeed not satisfied with a status quo that inflicts immense suffering on millions of people, and are therefore willing to support some aspects of the Western agenda, but who can fully identify with only one constituency: the victims of conflict? Where does that leave those who understand power politics, but are fully cognizant of the dangers, in a nuclear age, of a world in which unprincipled power politics would once again be the organising frame of reference?   As principled pragmatists we believe that the reality of double standards doesn’t justify an absence of any standards, and that multiple wrongs don’t make a right.   But in a more fragmented and more complex world, the prevention and resolution of conflict, like the new wars themselves, has to be multilayered. It has to address its local as well as regional, global and transnational dimensions.   Our world has become less intelligible, and shaping the debate has become more important. Political leaders have lost some of their capacity to control outcomes, and multiple actors, from the bottom up, need to be influenced. In the absence of a shared frame of reference, different arguments need to be used with different audiences. It is better to engage than to lecture.   Moreover, we have all learned the hard way that there are no obvious answers to the difficult challenges of our world.   There is doubt about the utility and efficacy of international intervention, whether it is conducted by the U.S., by NATO, or by UN peacekeepers. Hesitation is healthy when it is rooted in awareness of the inevitable moral hazard of intervening in the lives of others, and leads to more humility.   But we must also learn to recognise more quickly when and how to mobilise and legitimise new forms of collective action. That means fighting the growing temptation of retrenchment, based on the perception that the world is just too complicated for any effective human intervention. Never have our destinies been more intertwined, even though we are a less cohesive international community. As the risk of more dangerous and more complex conflicts increases, we can turn the complexity of the world into an asset, using the fluidity of the present dispensation of power to find new allies.   As it picks its way through this more complex moral jungle around conflict, Crisis Group will not forget that our compass in our search for peace and security over the past twenty years has been our commitment to the actual and potential victims of more conflict. And as we look toward the next twenty years, we shall not lose sight of our conviction that there is never any excuse for ignorance and indifference.   * To mark the 20th anniversary of International Crisis Group, we are publishing a series of 20 essays by foreign policy thinkers forecasting the “Future of Conflict”, access the essays via the link below. Visit the related web page
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