Matt Broomfield
This week saw an outbreak of brutal, racist, far-right violence, as armed gangs of Turkish men terrorised Kurdish families and elderly people in Leuven, Belgium. The ‘manhunt’ seeking out and beating ethnic Kurds, which left two in critical condition, was not the work of individual Turkish nationalists, but conducted by an organised, paramilitary group. The so-called ‘Grey Wolves’, a group variously characterised as neo-fascist, ultra-nationalist and Islamist, has historically operated as a ‘death squad’ conducting massacres of non-Turkish minorities including the Kurds, Alevis and Armenians.
The group has been blamed for the bulk of thousands of deaths in Turkey during the 1970s, including the murders of 694 identified left-wing activists and intellectuals. It has even fought alongside Islamist militias in Syria, participated in a coup attempt in Azerbaijan, and been implicated in the unsuccessful assassination of Pope John Paul II. It’s quite a record.
The fact that an organisation with such a bloody history and present-day commitment to ultranationalist violence is able to operate freely in the streets of Europe is a scandal in itself. France banned the Grey Wolves in 2020 as a result of their “extremely violent actions”, notably the desecration of a memorial to victims of the Armenian Genocide in which Turkish nationalists slaughtered over a million members of the Christian minority. (The Grey Wolves had previously gone further, bombing a memorial to the genocide in the same country, while they’ve also targeted a memorial in Brussels.) The European Parliament, too, has urged its member organisations to ban a group described by federal authorities as the “largest right-wing extremist organisation” in Germany – quite a feat in that country, it must be said.
But Europe is not united in opposition to the brutal, far-right group. On the contrary, the violence in Belgium has demonstrated that some elected European politicians have sympathies for, or even directly support, the Grey Wolves and their virulent, nationalistic ideology.
Notably then Yasin Gül, the deputy mayor of the Belgian region marred by the racist attacks during the Kurdish Newroz festival, has already been expelled from Belgium’s Christian Democratic and Flemish Party after footage emerged of him vowing to “fight until the Turkish flag is flying all over the world”. But Gül remains in office, and following the violence he made an appearance on Turkish television to absurdly blame the Kurdish victims who were left bleeding on the ground or terrorized in their homes. (In fact, he appeared on CNN Türk, the US news network’s local affiliate in Turkey which operates as a mouthpiece for the government. CNN have their own questions to answer about allowing their name to be used to peddle nationalistic propaganda 24/7.)
And nor is Gül alone. In 2019, a Brussels municipal mayor Emir Kir, was condemned for travelling to Turkey to meet with the Grey Wolves’ parent party MHP. In 2016, Sweden’s Green Party Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan attended a reception alongside leading Grey Wolves. The group has also established networks and contacts within establishment political organisations in Germany and Austria.
As it happens then the concept of a cordon sanitaire, through which politicians refuse to engage with representatives of a party considered unacceptably radical, gained contemporary political traction with reference to the far-right Flemish Nationalist party Vlaams Blok. That nationalist, anti-immigrant organisation has since been banned from public life in Belgium. But racism is racism, even when it’s Turkish racism against the Kurdish, Alevi or Armenian minorities. The Belgian authorities would do well to follow the example of other European authorities and ban the Grey Wolves, sending a message to Turkey that far-right paramilitary violence is unacceptable at home or abroad.
*Matt Broomfield is a freelance journalist, poet and activist. He writes for VICE, Medya News, the New Statesman and the New Arab; his prose has been published by The Mays, Anti-Heroin Chic and Plenitude; and his poetry by the National Poetry Society, the Independent, and Bare Fiction. His work was displayed across London by Poetry on the Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year.
