After the bombs

Maureen Freely grew up in Istanbul. After Friday's terrorist attacks she caught the first plane back - and found the city bloodied but defiant

When the bomb exploded outside the synagogue in the old Istanbul neighbourhood of Galata 10 days ago, my brother Brendan was in his flat around the corner. When the bomb went off outside the British consulate five days later, he was on his way to his favourite chicken shop outside the fish market opposite the consulate entrance. If he had left a quarter of an hour earlier, he would no longer be with us.

My parents were on their way to buy a new refrigerator that morning. They were heading for the mall just a hill or two inland, across the street from the HSBC Bank. Had they left 10 minutes earlier, they would have been standing in traffic next to the truck carrying the bomb.

My friend Nakiye was meant to have been at a meeting in the Renault building, also just across from the HSBC. She was leaving her office when she got a call that pushed the meeting forward half an hour. If she had not caught that call, she would have been outside the bank at the time of the blast.

Outside the bank is a metro station. My father's colleague Yannis had just come out of it and was a few hundred yards away when the bomb went off. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, my 22-year-old niece was boarding the same metro line. She had spent the evening with her best friend, who lives a few hundred yards from the consulate. The friend had tried to talk her into taking the day off work. If she had, they would probably have witnessed the bombing from their favourite haunt, the old Greek wine bar across the street from the red guardhouse that flanked the entrance to the British consulate and is now a pile of rubble.

This might sound a set of strange coincidences, but they are not. All the bombs that went off in Istanbul last week were in busy neighbourhoods that hundreds of thousands of people pass through daily. Most of them might be Turkish Muslims, but Istanbul has always been a city of many religions and cultures. A large percentage of the country's Turkish non-Muslims are concentrated in these same areas, as are the city's many thousands of foreign residents and the many hundreds of foreign-owned businesses. The area around the British consulate is teeming with other consulates. There are three churches and a mosque within a few hundred yards. There is no way of targeting foreigners without targeting Turks in these crowded streets and no way of protecting them either. This is presumably why the Foreign Office has advised all British nationals to stay away from the city until further notice, and why almost everyone I know in England thinks I was crazy to fly home on the first plane.

I am glad I did. I am glad, most of all, because I have learned, once again, not to trust what I see on television. Especially if I am seeing a place I think I know. My family moved to Istanbul when I was eight, and have lived there almost continuously since, so every pile of rubble I saw on television last week was a building ripped from my past. There was the Greek delicatessen where we bought our butter and our bacon when I was little. There was the consular residence, where my own children used to play. There was the chapel where my best friend was confirmed. There was the hospital where my father had his hip operation last summer. But now it was what Bush was calling the new front in his war on terror. I felt physically ill, and I felt worse every time a well-meaning person asked me if my family was safe. "Well that's all right, then," they would say. Oh no it is not, I wanted to say. It is not all right at all.

Radio 4 and the broadsheet comment pages reflected my pessimism. A bridge between east and west had been destroyed, said one. It was only a matter of time before the west pulled out entirely. I had heard all about the new draconian security measures: the truck now blocking the gate to the American-owned Robert College, where my brother-in-law teaches; the armed guards and sniffer dogs outside the malls, the banks, the supermarkets, and just about anything with a foreign-sounding name; the blockades around the building that was, until a few months ago, the US consulate, and has now become the temporary headquarters for the British. So I was expecting to find the streets empty and most of the city's 10 million residents cowering behind closed doors.

Indeed, there was a great hush in the arrivals lounge. For the first time ever, I did not have to queue for a visa. But once we had left the airport, it was hard to see any sign of a crisis. The streets were clogged with traffic and people shopping for the holiday that begins today. The shores of the Bosphorus were lined with fishermen and a procession of large, slow-moving families enjoying the unusually fine weather. The restaurants and cafes were doing a brisk business, and every few hundred metres there was a florist overflowing on to the pavement to meet the seasonal demand.

In my brother's neighbourhood, which was ankle deep in broken glass a week ago, the glaziers have been working so hard that there is a joke rumour going around that they were the masterminds behind the bomb. Now all but a few of the windows have been replaced, bar the ones on the mosque next door to the synagogue. The buildings across the street have lost their fronts and been condemned. But the lighting store next to them is open for business.

My brother says that the shopkeepers on the street were out with their brooms within minutes of the explosion. It was the residents who got the wounded to hospital. He saw no official presence for two hours.

They are very much in evidence now. Those with homes or businesses in the affected areas must leave their identity cards with the police manning the barricades. Anyone who stops to look at the damage can expect to be filmed by a man who may or may not be an innocent journalist. It is all very subtle, and very calm. The shopkeepers in the fish and flower markets near to where the entrance to the British consulate stood until last Thursday do not want to talk about the bomb any more. They would rather sell me a string of red peppers or talk me into a pair of wonky glasses and a monster mask. Like my friends, they see staying at home behind closed doors as a form of defeat. They are determined to get life back to normal as soon as possible, no matter what.

This was Istanbul's September 11. They thought they were safe from the war on terror because they thought all Muslims were brothers. Now they know otherwise, and are unified in their condemnation of the terrorists, who cannot be "true Muslims". The fact that the terrorists staged this attack in the last days of Ramadan has added to their outrage. But no one is in any doubt why the city has become a terrorist target. How its residents respond to their new status depends very much on how much support they get (or fail to get) from the allies who dragged them into this. As one shopkeeper put it, "Surely, now that we have suffered this, the EU must open its arms to us." If it doesn't, or if the US gives the impression, as it has sometimes done in the past, that it is taking Turkey's "sacrifice" for granted, the sense of betrayal could be huge.

But right now, everyone's mind is on the present, on trying to survive. By that I do not mean that people are avoiding danger, but that they are quite adamantly refusing to let danger change the way they live. And God only knows they have had practice. In the past three years, they have been playing this game so much they have hardly had time to breathe. Begin with the earthquake, in which the official death toll was 18,000 but may well have been twice that. Continue with the crippling recession, which has yet to ease, and the crimewave that has followed in its wake. Even so, this has remained an exemplary city. To visit Istanbul over the past few years has been to see friends look after each other in ways that we in the privatised west have long forgotten. According to the local code of conduct, the most dangerous thing is solitude, the next worst thing is to sit at home behind closed doors. The worse things get, the more important it is to go out with your friends and do whatever you have to do to laugh adversity away.

Two winters ago, when the recession was really beginning to bite, my friend Nakiye and I went out to an all-night dancing club. At least half the people there had lost good, secure jobs. When the owner put on an insipid Turkish pop song entitled "I'm deep in a depression" they all jumped to their feet and did a communal belly dance.

When Nakiye and I met on Sunday, the fog that had been sitting over the city earlier in the day suddenly cleared, and it was much in the same spirit that we went out to a fish restaurant on the Bosphorus to watch the sunset. No one else wanted to discuss "the events" any more than she did but their relatives and their mobile phones had other plans. Everyone at the table spoke of the stream of anxious calls they had been getting from dear ones currently abroad, urging them to get out on the first plane.

This sort of thing is easy to shrug off, perhaps, if you are Turkish and Istanbul is your home. It is trickier for those of us who have roots in this city but carry foreign passports. It would be hard to understand this from the sort of coverage we receive in Britain. As my childhood friend Becky says, "They just don't get the point." Because Istanbul is not another Riyadh, where foreigners jet in for two or three years to service foreign interests, to live in separate compounds. It has been the opposite of Riyadh since the days of Byzantium. There were large and commercially significant European concessions - Venetian, Genoese, British, and French - and many of their descendants remained in the city throughout the Ottoman Empire. There were 100,000 Greeks in the city right up until the Cyprus crisis in 1964. About a third of the girls in my secondary school were Greek, Armenian, and Jewish. The last time I went to my sister's (Catholic) church I heard a service in which children sang Christmas carols in 17 languages.

Bogazici University, where my father still teaches, has been a Turkish institution since the early 1970s, but for a century before that it was an American college for Turks. When we arrived 43 years ago, most of the faculty was still American and more than a few of them had come here because, like my father, they dreamed of a world beyond McCarthy, 50s conformity and cold war paranoia. We did not lock ourselves up in expatriate isolation; we were part of the city and we still are.

The gulf that divides the east from the west is something we think about a great deal but we do not see it reflected in our everyday lives. Istanbul is more cosmopolitan than it has ever been. Millions have either worked in Germany and other parts of Europe and still have families there. Any family that can afford it makes sure that they give their children a chance to spend time studying abroad. Since the earthquake, eased relations with Greece have opened the way to an array of cultural and educational exchange programmes. The economic links between the two countries are also growing, as have the links with countries in the former eastern bloc.

When I was a child, Istanbul was an enchanted but neglected cold war outpost. Over the past decade, I have watched it become the hub for all the regions that surround it, a city neither eastern nor western but both at the same time. It still is, but for how much longer?

As we sit drinking coffee around the corner from the British consulate, gazing calmly at yet another high-sided vehicle that could be carrying 500lbs of cheap explosives, my brother has difficulty keeping up the front. No matter how hard he tries, his memories of the first and nearest bomb keep crowding into his mind. The worst part was seeing the dead in the street and recognising their faces. He tells me about the disembodied hand he saw sticking out of a mound of broken glass. He can't help wondering if this was the hand that detonated the bomb that killed his neighbourhood. "It's not just politics," he says. "They're attacking our way of life."

He is determined to stay, he tells me. All the other Istanbullus-from-elsewhere I know are telling me the same thing. The city is in a bad and dangerous place right now, stuck as it is between two armies of fundamentalists. The nearness of these bombs makes it feel as if they are closing in. But it has also made us remember what we treasure about this city, and why we are not going to give it up without a fight.

"How its residents respond to their new status depends very much on how much support they get (or fail to get) from the allies who dragged them into this."

Oh, they must mean the kind of support the Americans recieved when over three thousand innocent people lost their lives on September 11, 2001. And, what is "it" exactly that its allies dragged them into? The allies didn't do this....terrorists did and when that fact can be accepted, then perhaps they will be more eager in helping rid the world of terrorists.

The strange thing here is that I don't sense that much anger or hear any real condemnation. There's fear and bewilderment, but you don't hear any calls for action against the perpetrators or denunciations of Islamism from her.

Think about what your own reaction would be if this happened in your hometown. After you got over the shock of it all wouldn't you mainly be furious at the SOB's that did it?

There's a lot more in this article with which you probably took no issue. I hope.

>> The allies didn't do this....terrorists did and when that fact can be accepted, then perhaps they will be more eager in helping rid the world of terrorists.

OUR ALLIES STILL HAVE NOT PLACED IBDA/C ON THEIR LIST OF TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS!!!!! WE HAVE TOLD THEM FOR EVER TO DO SO BUT THEY WOULD NOT OUT OF FEAR THAT THEY THEMSELVES WOULD BECOME TARGETS!!!!! AS A RESULT IBDA/C AND OTHERS HAVE FOUND SAFE HAVEN WITH OUR ALLIES.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?????

Fundamentalist Islam and Fundamentalist Kemalism/Secularism.

Turkey as a country and the Turkish people as a nation have oriented themselves to absorb all that's good that's been learned and evolved by the people in Europe and America over the past few centuries. That in the face of enormous prejudice and ignorance regarding us and what we really stand for. We are determined in that we will stay the course, for the good of those not as fortunate, as say I. I am a fundamentalist, an idealist. I will smyte anyone who stands to steer us from our course.

And then there are the other fundamentalists.. I outnumber them 10 to 1. Tomorrow I'll outnumber them 11 to 1.

>> Turkey stayed out of the war in Iraq, so how did we drag them into anything.

Again, you are saying "we", and it's not just you.

First off, when you start a war right next door, knowing very well that it will attract al Murder, if not already there, and then tout Turkey as what you'd like the place to be like, you are dragging us in. No brainer. All'd be well if you were able to instantly harness the situation in Iraq, but that's obviously a delusion at any age, especially when you can't slaughter folks at will in this age.

Second, think about the SUPPORT given to terrorists by our other allies, which is plainly an outrage totally exceeding the abovementioned.

All that drags us in.

To head off your probable response:

More of our parliamentarians would have voted for the resolution to join you in Iraq, had you agreed that your "strategic partner" put 80,000 troops in there beside you. But instead, you were adamant that 80,000 US troops should be stationed in Turkey, where the nations trust in you had already been shaken over the past ten years with your congress voting to warn us for human rights abuses during our war on terror (30,000+ PLUS LIVES!!! IT COST) and voted to block arms sales to us, arms we needed to fight that war. Not to mention that the main terror organization was fundraising freely in the US at that time...

But that's all history. I did not post this to push your buttons, or try to smear egg on your face. Agree or disagree with her one point on this matter, I posted this for all the other information in the article. The mood, the resiliance, the stubbornness, the diverseness, the comradery, the innocence.

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