Three employees of a Christian publishing house were slaughtered earlier this week, in what members of the nation’s Christian minority are calling a “witch hunt” spurred by religious and cultural anxiety tied to upcoming presidential elections. As the New York Times observes, “Change is opening up Turkish society, and the country’s nationalist fringe, for whom the ethnic and religious purity of the Turkish state is worth killing for, has been turning to violence more often.” The three staffers were found at the offices of Zivre, located in the city of Malatya, bound to their chairs with their throats slit. Nearly a dozen suspects have already been apprehended, many of them bearing nationalist propaganda sheets on their person when arrested. (According to the Times, however, it is not yet clear whether the killings were committed by anti-Christian Muslims or anti-European Turkish nationalists.)
Ertugrul Ozkok, the nation’s most popular op-ed columnist, did more than just denounce the murders in his most recent column for Hurriyet; he described the brutal incident as “Turkey’s collective responsibility,” accusing all citizens of failing to address the warning signs of impending evil. “The murder in Malatya is a byproduct of our collective lack of comprehension, our inability to see what is going on,” he wrote. “I won’t list the names of the people leading these provocations—it’ll only start a polemic, and we all know who they are anyway.”