With the world on edge, Turkey’s government blames the usual suspects

At a moment when Turkey’s government should really be trying to mend fences with the Russians, it instead appears to be using this tragedy for cynical political purposes. Reuters reports that Turkish officials are now insinuating that the assassination has to do with the Gulen Network, an Islamic religious and political rival to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was also blamed for the recent attempted military coup.

It’s all a bit convenient, isn’t it?

Perhaps you remember the 2004 Atocha Station bombing in Madrid. Without any evidence to support the claim, the conservative Partido Popular government of former President Jose Maria Aznar immediately blamed the Basque terrorist organization ETA, whose campaign of targeted assassinations had been plaguing Spain’s national governments for decades. ETA was (and is) of course a horrific collection of murderers and accomplices, but historically it also serves as a common distraction that Spanish politicians use when they face unrelated problems.

The ETA accusation was convenient, but it didn’t make much sense, given that the Atocha massacre bore no resemblance to ETA’s usual modus operandi. And of course, it proved to be laughably false, as jihadists quickly took credit for the massacre. Three days later, and almost certainly as a direct result of the decision to blame ETA, Aznar’s hand-picked successor was defeated in an election in which the polls had shown him easily winning right up to that point.

I’m no expert on Gulenism. Perhaps I’m wrong to bring this up. But the Turkish government’s reaction to today’s events bears an uncanny resemblance to that incident in Spain, and the consequences could be a lot more severe than the mere loss of an election.