Dateline’s special episode 'New Zealand’s Darkest Day'. Watch the full story now at SBS On Demand.
In a televised rally in Antalya, in southern Turkey, on Sunday — and twice the day before — Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan used an edited version of the Christchurch mosque attack video to galvanise support among his Islamist followers before local elections at the end of the month and criticise the Turkish opposition as weak.
The attacker, identified as Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, posted a lengthy manifesto before the attacks that said, among other things, that Muslims should be driven out of the part of Turkey that lies west of the Bosporus.
The president played fragments of the video — with blurred images of the attack — at several election rallies and paired them with statements by a Turkish opposition leader to equate his opponent with a notorious Australian senator, Fraser Anning, who blamed Muslim immigration for the attacks.
“We have lived through something in New Zealand, haven’t we?” he said. “A poor imitation of a politician there said something. What did he say? He holds Islam responsible for terror,” Erdogan said as he presented the video, criticising Anning.
On Sunday, Facebook said it had removed 1.5million videos of the attack that had been posted worldwide, including 1.2million that were blocked at upload. The company said it was also removing edited versions of the video that did not show graphic content.
But Erdogan, who is campaigning for his Justice and Development Party at daily rallies, has used the attacks to stir up popular feeling. On Friday, he said that he had spoken to one of the three Turkish citizens injured in the Christchurch attack and cursed the perpetrator in stirring language. He called Tarrant a vile murderer and said he had threatened violence in his manifesto specifically against Turkey, its population and its leader.
“Together with all Muslims, our country, our nation and myself are targeted,” Erdogan said at a rally in the southern city of Gaziantep. “What does it say? That we shouldn’t go west of the Bosporus, meaning Europe. Otherwise, he would come to Istanbul, kill us all, drive us out of our land.”
Turks are heading to the polls on March 31 for municipal elections. Nine months ago, they not only re-elected Erdogan as president but also approved constitutional changes that granted him sweeping new powers, changing the country’s parliamentary system into a presidential one.
Although Erdogan remains popular, he is feeling the pressure of a recessionary economy and a currency collapse that have cut into Turks’ living standards. Still, Turkey’s overall economic success story has provided a strong underpinning for Erdogan throughout his 17-year rule as prime minister and now president.
