Turkey: Revisiting a Flashpoint of the Democratization Process

The most precious books in the one-room Umut bookshop, located in the southeastern Turkish city of Semdinli, are actually several volumes that have burnt edges and shredded covers smudged with soot. Kept in two brightly lit bookcases with glass doors, the books are the survivors of a grenade attack two years ago, the impact of which continues to be felt in the predominantly-Kurdish southeast region of Turkey.

The charred books are displayed along with a teapot pierced by shrapnel, while two small craters on the floor, marking where the grenades exploded, have been left untouched, giving the place the feel of both a bookstore and memorial. This is exactly how its owner, Seferi Yilmaz, wants it to be.

"I believe this is part of our history and I want it to be remembered," Yilmaz says. "The event gave me more responsibility. Before I was just a simple bookseller, but now I am on the international stage."

Yilmaz, 45, is only slightly exaggerating. The bombing of his bookstore, on November 9, 2005, was followed by several days of violent rioting throughout the southeast. The trial of those accused of the attack – two members of Turkey's security forces – led to a dramatic showdown between the Turkish government and the country's powerful military, and put the country's commitment to democratization and improving human rights to what is still an ongoing test.

"It's a very important case," says Emma Sinclair-Webb, a Human Rights Watch researcher on Turkey. "It was a real opportunity to investigate what certain elements of the state have been suspected of having done for a long time, which is take the law into their own hands."

Semdinli is only some 20 miles from the Iraqi border, where Turkey is currently building up its troops and threatening an invasion in pursuit of the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), who have staged numerous attacks against Turkish forces in recent months. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Although the possibility of a cross-border raid is again raising tensions in the region, many locals say they trace the changed atmosphere to the period following the bookstore bombing.

"Everything changed after Semdinli. Since then, people are worried that things will go back to the way they were before," says Ismail Arslan, a radio journalist in Yuksekova, a town near Semdinli. "It was a turning point. People were at the point that they started to believe in democracy, but after this, people started to again believe that there is a