Communicationist Approach to Suicide Bombings: Lessons From the Palestinian, Al-Qaida and Kurdish Suicide Bombers’ Farewell Messages

Kerim Balci, Turkish columnist and journalist, provided a comparative analysis of Al-Qaeda, PKK and Palestinian suicide bombers from the philosophical perspective espoused by Mikhael Bakthin, a twentieth-century Russian philosopher. Mr Balci explained that Bakthin suggests that man has an innate yearning to live and that he satisfies this by “writing his own novel of which he is both the author and the hero”.

Taking Bakthin’s view, Mr Balci explained that the Palestinian youth are incapable of philosophically “fixing” themselves in life, preventing them from authoring their own novel. This, Mr Balci argued, means that according to Bakthin these youth are not philosophically “living” at all. Therefore, Mr Balci claimed that these suicide bombers are in fact coming to life through their death, by declaring their existence to the world through their actions of defiance and fixing their name in time and space, thereby writing their novel of which they have become the hero.

In contrast with the Palestinian suicide bombers the PKK suicide bombers, who at the outset already considered themselves to be free, powerful and therefore “heroes” of their own novels, were not in fact wilful volunteers of their suicide missions. These militants did not feel the urge “kill themselves to live” because they were already capable of living through the freedom and power they considered themselves to possess. Therefore, Mr Balci explained that the PKK were having difficulty in recruiting suicide bombers and that of the 15 suicide attacks in Turkey in 1995, 14 of them were carried out by militants who were coerced by the PKK.