Gallery attack ignites debate

Associated Press

ISTANBUL

The gang of dozens of men with sticks and pepper spray moved from one art gallery to the next, assaulting overflow crowds that had spilled into the streets during the joint opening of several exhibitions in the center of Istanbul.

“You don’t want us, so we don’t want you,” Nazim Hikmet Richard Dikbas, an artist, recalled one of the assailants saying. Hikmet was struck on the head with a club, and received several stitches at a hospital for a hairline injury.

Half a dozen suspects were detained in last week’s brazen attack, which has yet to be fully explained. Such outbursts of mob rage are rare, and Istanbul has a relatively low rate of violent crime, but the gallery beatings highlighted Turkey’s struggle to reconcile sharp differences in a society marked by extremes of rich and poor, modern and traditional, secular and Islamic, democratic and authoritarian.

Once shackled by crisis and conflict, Turkey has emerged as a regional power, evident in its high-profile role at the U.N. Security Council summit in New York this week. The Sept. 21 attack in Tophane district, however, recalled a dark world of impunity and vigilante justice that hindered Turkey’s modern development and that the nation’s leaders have sought to consign to the past.

Tophane, a cluttered area that slopes down to the Bosporus Strait separating the Asian and European continents, hosts two entirely different ways of life, side by side. Bearded men with prayer beads sip tea at sidewalk tables. Some women wear traditional shawls; a few have Islamic veils. Then there are the young artists and collectors, urbane denizens of Tophane’s 10 or so galleries. A chat in German — tourists on a tight budget — flowed from one doorway.

These two worlds, roughly defined as conservative and liberal, occupy a cluster of narrow streets where privacy is scarce. Many galleries sprouted in Tophane, one of Istanbul’s oldest neighborhoods, in the last few years, buoyed by a surge in interest in Turkish art.

Some residents had complained about alcohol consumption at the galleries, suggesting religious values might have shaped hostility. Islam forbids drinking alcohol. The polarizing topic of religion in Turkey pits a government led by pious Muslims against the waning power of hard-line secularists, including the military and top judges.

On the night of the attack, some galleries served alcoholic punch or wine in plastic cups, though at least one visitor was seen with a beer can on the street. At least five people were injured, and some windows were broken, and witnesses said arriving police did not intervene in some assaults. The attackers did not enter the galleries.

One theory among artists is that political extremists engineered the attack in order to create division, thereby radicalizing Turks. Conspiracy theories prosper in Turkey, where democracy is maturing and many crimes have been attributed to the so-called “deep state,” an alleged network of hard-line nationalists with links to state institutions.