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	Workers Vanguard No. 1027	12 July 2013

Turkey: Mass Protests Shake Islamist Regime

Break with Islamic Reaction, Turkish Nationalism—For Workers Revolution!

For a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan!

Turkey continues to be roiled by protests that began at the end of May directed against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). The protests, which have taken place in a number of cities, were triggered by brutal attempts by the police to enforce plans for a building project in Gezi Park near Taksim Square in central Istanbul. The government’s hardline response has for now succeeded in tamping down the scope of the demonstrations. Some 8,000 people have been injured, 60 of them seriously, with eleven blinded by tear gas canisters fired at them. Four demonstrators have been killed, while unknown numbers of people have been arrested or have disappeared.

Turkish society is polarized. Erdogan retains a base of support, particularly among the bourgeoisie in the country’s Anatolian heartland and among the rural masses. Those who have protested are concentrated among younger elements in the better-educated middle classes in the larger cities who deeply resent Erdogan’s Islamist regime. Some workers in Turkey’s politically divided trade-union movement have participated, as have members of the oppressed Kurdish national minority.

After coming to power in 2002, Erdogan and the AKP proceeded to implement their reactionary religious program. Turkey today has over 85,000 mosques, one for every 900 citizens—compared to one hospital for every 60,000 citizens, with more imams (prayer leaders) than doctors or teachers. In his first term, Erdogan tried unsuccessfully to pass a law criminalizing adultery, with three years in jail for straying from the marriage bed. Koran study classes were introduced in primary schools.

More recently, restrictions on the sale and advertisement of alcohol were imposed. After Turkish Airlines attempted to force female flight attendants to wear new uniforms featuring ankle-length dresses and tried to ban red lipstick and nail polish, protests forced the company to back down. In his crusade against abortion (and Caesarean sections as well!), Erdogan lectured Turkish women to have at least three children. He has also frequently denounced gay rights. Last May, kissing was banned in the subway of the capital city, Ankara, targeting couples acting against “moral rules.”

An important part of the backdrop to the current protests was the agreement the government reached in March with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which for three decades has been waging a military struggle in predominantly Kurdish southeastern Turkey against the central government. Over 40,000 Kurds have been butchered by the army in their courageous effort to assert Kurdish national rights. The agreement is supposed to provide “autonomy” for the Kurdish people, including greater cultural and language rights, as well as freedom for PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and other imprisoned activists. While keeping its weapons, the PKK declared a cease-fire, with many of its fighters withdrawing to the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. PKK military leaders have complained of the one-sided “peace process” in which the Kurds make concessions while new Turkish army posts are constructed in the Kurdish areas. On June 28, security forces fired on protesters in the Diyarbakir province in Kurdistan, killing one man. In Istanbul the next day some 10,000 leftists and Kurds as well as a number of public sector unionists protested this murder.

The protests in Taksim Square reflect the sharp polarization in Turkish society over the Kurdish national question. The pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) was slow to mobilize its supporters, reflecting ambivalence over Erdogan, the PKK’s partner in negotiations. Once there, young militants with placards of Öcalan were confronted with flag-waving Turkish chauvinists. The two major bourgeois opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), to which the fascistic Gray Wolves are connected, have been trying to take advantage of discontent with Erdogan. The MHP in particular has condemned the government for being too conciliatory to the PKK and the Kurds.

Over the past ten years, per capita gross domestic product increased by 43 percent in real terms, with exports increasing nearly tenfold and foreign direct investment also jumping. Turkey is now the world’s 17th-largest economy. However, the country is highly dependent on foreign capital, the withdrawal of which could trigger an economic downturn. While adherence to IMF guidelines, cuts in social spending and massive privatization have benefited a new layer of capitalist entrepreneurs, prosperity and wealth have not trickled down to the Turkish and Kurdish workers and peasants. The minimum wage for workers remains at 773 Turkish lira, or $395 per month, with a six-day workweek. Many workers labor 70 hours a week for even less pay in the “gray market” that accounts for a third of the Turkish economy. The official jobless rate is near 9 percent. Youth unemployment is over 20 percent.

Turkey has a significant industrial proletariat. But less than 10 percent of the workforce is unionized, reflecting the massive defeat inflicted on the workers movement by a 1980 military coup and three subsequent decades of heavy repression. This May Day, unions tried to organize a rally at Taksim Square, but a heavy police presence and use of tear gas prevented it from going ahead. After the current wave of protests broke out several weeks later, two union federations—the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DISK) and the Confederation of Public Workers Unions (KESK)—called a solidarity strike, which the largest union federation refused to honor. But DISK and KESK limited themselves to endorsing the demands of the Taksim Solidarity Committee, such as freeing the detainees and halting the development of Gezi Park. One KESK official stated that “unions shouldn’t occupy a role as if they are the teachers or the leaders. We have to simply be part of it.” This is effectively a statement that the working class—the only class with the potential to overturn the capitalist order—must remain simply a subordinate component of the trans-class popular opposition to the AKP regime.

Various pseudo-Marxists are hailing a “Turkish Spring,” calling to “Turn Taksim Square into [Cairo’s] Tahrir Square!” This is both factually misleading and politically dim. The main outcome of the “Arab Spring” was to strengthen the forces of political Islam, which were entrusted in Tunisia and Egypt (as well as Libya, courtesy of NATO bombs and missiles) with carrying out capitalist austerity against the workers and the poor. The leaders of the protests in Tahrir Square have oscillated between supporting the Islamists and hailing the army officers, while workers remain ground down and women enslaved. The protesters in Turkey have been explicitly opposing an Islamist government that has been in power for over a decade.

This rejection of creeping Islamization is positive. But it does not address the class divisions in society. The proletariat must come forward to lead all the oppressed in the struggle against capitalist rule. If the proletariat is to prevail as an independent aspirant to power, it has to be broken from religious reaction, Turkish chauvinism and all forms of nationalism. This requires the leadership of a multinational Leninist vanguard party, forged from the advanced workers and revolutionary intellectuals.

Legacy of Atatürk

There were heated disputes at the Gezi Park protests over Kemal Atatürk, the founding leader of the modern Turkish state following the post-World War I dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Chants of “Freedom for Öcalan” were counterposed to shouts of “We are Atatürk’s soldiers.”

Atatürk is a controversial figure, whose legacy means different things to different people. Acting as the vanguard of the nascent Turkish bourgeoisie, the Kemalists introduced a series of reforms designed to develop Turkey as a modern capitalist nation-state. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his Republican People’s Party inherited an economically backward country without concentrated modern industry. The small capitalist class in those days was Armenian and Greek, with a small Jewish component. The Kemalists proclaimed the country a secular republic and abolished the caliphate (office of Islamic ruler). Islam ceased to be the state religion, and sharia law was replaced by a constitution based on the Swiss civil code and (Mussolini’s) Italian penal code. Polygamy was abolished, and religious brotherhoods and orders were outlawed. Religious symbols—the veil in schools and public institutions, and the fez everywhere—were banned. (See “Turkey: Women and the Permanent Revolution,” WV No. 916, 6 June 2008.)

Atatürk was a modernizing nationalist who thought he could transport the country from the Middle Ages into the 20th century with a few strokes of the pen. His reforms were necessarily partial, imposed from above in a backward country that was 80 percent rural. There were no attempts at land reform or expropriation of the large landowners. Although the caliphate was abolished, a real separation of state and mosque was never carried through. Instead, the religious hierarchy was put under state control by means of the Directorate of Religious Affairs.

Urban women, especially those of the ruling class, certainly benefited from the Kemalist reforms. However, the lives of the overwhelming majority of women, especially in the backward, conservative countryside, changed little. Democratic gains that Western women take for granted, such as the right to choose a marriage partner, are not available to many Turkish women. This experience shows in the negative the limitations of bourgeois reforms: the oppression of women, rooted in the institution of the family, is brutally reinforced by the pronounced poverty, inequality and economic scarcity of Turkish society.

The Kurdish National Question

The Turkish republic was founded in 1923 following a fierce war that defeated the imperialists, notably Britain, and their allies, who had sought to carve up what became modern Turkey. To build the national capitalist state, the Kemalist movement used Turkish nationalism as a weapon. The Armenians—victims of a genocidal massacre in World War I—were mainly driven from the country, as were the Greeks, and the Jews were subjected to pogromist violence.

Soon after its inception, the Turkish state sought to forcibly assimilate the Kurdish population and destroy its separate national identity. Speaking and publishing in the Kurdish language were banned, and the constitution codified the Kemalist doctrine that Turkey was strictly Turkish. Eventually Kurds were defined as “mountain Turks.” In the early 1960s, the government enacted a law to change Kurdish place names into Turkish ones. State repression skyrocketed, particularly with the onset of military clashes with the PKK in the mid 1980s, and tens of thousands of Kurds were locked away in Turkish jails.

The military destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages, killing tens of thousands and prompting massive population transfers. Today a majority of the roughly 15 million Kurds in Turkey live in the western cities; one estimate holds that there are three million Kurds in Istanbul alone. According to a study by the Konda research institute, almost a quarter of Kurds living in Istanbul reside in one of the city’s slums. For cities in the Mediterranean’s easternmost regions, for example Mersin and Antalya, the figure is 72 percent, in Izmir just under 60 percent. The study also shows that nearly a third of Kurds of working age are unemployed, while 27 percent of Kurds are excluded from the social security systems.

Kurdistan itself is largely an economic backwater, consisting overwhelmingly of hideously downtrodden peasants and landless sharecroppers under the heels of the Kurdish landed gentry, the Sunni clergy and the Turkish military. But partly as a result of the scorched-earth tactics pursued by the army, a Kurdish proletariat was created, taking part in integrated class struggle in both western Europe and Turkey.

In the Zonguldak miners strike in 1991, Turkish and Kurdish miners fought side by side for days. One of their demands was for an end to U.S. imperialism’s “Desert Storm” war against Iraq. In the winter of 2009-10, Kurdish and Turkish workers waged a courageous strike when Tekel, the former state tobacco monopoly, was privatized and sold to British American Tobacco, resulting in the closing of 12 factories. Some 12,000 workers from around the country descended on Ankara in support of the dismissed workers, braving near-freezing temperatures to hold a sit-in at a central park. The state reacted with brute force as police beat and pepper-sprayed workers and arrested their leaders. The strike drew nationwide support, with 100,000 workers marching in solidarity. Although the union tops eventually sabotaged the strike, this battle demonstrated that nationalist divisions in the working class can be overcome in common class struggle.

The Kurdish people constitute the largest nation in the world without a state. Kurdistan extends from eastern Turkey and a portion of Syria through northern Iraq and into Iran. As Marxists who champion the equality of nations and combat all manifestations of national chauvinism, we emphasize that the rights of the Kurdish people can be won only by smashing the four capitalist states that oppress them. This perspective requires the interlinking of revolutionary struggles throughout the region as well as unconditional opposition to any imperialist intervention. As we explained in “Trotskyism vs. PKK Nationalism” (WV No. 716, 9 July 1999), that task requires the instrumentality of Leninist-Trotskyist parties that unite the working people of different national and ethnic backgrounds.

To win the confidence of the Kurdish working masses, such parties must demonstrate their opposition to all forms of anti-Kurdish chauvinism, for example, championing full and equal rights for the Kurdish language. Without giving political support to the PKK, proletarian revolutionaries in Turkey would side with that organization when it is engaged in military conflict with the bourgeois state. Defending the right of self-determination for the Kurdish people, i.e., the right to set up its own state, is a fundamental obligation for communists in Turkey.

In contradistinction, a June 4 statement of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) central committee wallows in Turkish chauvinism, claiming that the Turkish flag is now a “flag in the hands of patriotic people.” The Kurds have been persecuted, locked up and massacred for years by patriotic Turkish flag-wavers simply for calling themselves Kurds. Further, the TKP claims that “Kurdish politics” must “become a strong constituent of a united, patriotic, and enlightened working people’s movement.” And what if, contrary to the TKP’s Turkish patriotism, the Kurds choose to set up their own state? Such an option is not admitted by the TKP. Nor are these wretched politics new: the TKP has given support to the virulently anti-Kurdish CHP as an alternative to other bourgeois parties.

Marxists strongly oppose the petty-bourgeois nationalist program of the PKK. While the PKK has indeed waged a heroic military struggle against the far better equipped Turkish army, it rejects the need for proletarian revolution and writes off the Turkish working class. Thus, the PKK can only maneuver with various factions of the Turkish bourgeoisie as well as launch futile appeals to the European and American imperialists to intervene on its behalf.

Adapting its demands to what it hopes will be acceptable to the Turkish bourgeoisie, the PKK today does not call for independence for the Kurds. Instead it calls for autonomy, expecting to get more language and cultural rights as a part of the Turkish state. But regional autonomy under capitalism means that decisive power remains in the hands of the national state. Even if such an agreement were to be reached, it will be the Turkish bourgeois state and its army that will be in the driver’s seat and will ultimately determine exactly what rights Kurds do and do not get. This will never lead to national liberation for the Kurds.

It is only through revolutionary proletarian internationalist struggle—forging unity among the Kurdish, Turkish, Arab and Iranian working masses—that victory is possible. We call for a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan, part of a socialist federation of the Near East. This is a concrete expression of the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. In countries of belated capitalist development, the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions achieved long ago in the West cannot be solved within a capitalist framework. The crucial need to modernize these areas, carry out agrarian revolution, resolve the national oppression of the Kurds and other minorities and achieve elementary rights for women requires that the working class, supported by the peasantry, take power. In order to survive and flourish, socialist revolution in the backward countries must be extended to the advanced capitalist states of Europe, the U.S. and Japan, whose economic, technological and scientific technique is essential to raise the semicolonial world to the economic level of the West on the way to achieving a socialist society based on material abundance.

Political Islam in Turkey

As the Turkish people became disappointed with “secular” nationalist governments, successive regimes played the religious card. In fact, the Kemalist generals gave direct encouragement to the Islamists. In the late 1960s and 1970s there were hundreds of thousands of leftists in Turkey. In response, the generals encouraged the growth of clerical reaction. After a military coup in 1971, the authorities did not arrest the then leader of the political Islamists, Necmettin Erbakan, unlike the leaders of leftist parties. Erbakan rose from obscurity, taking part in two coalition governments in the 1970s as deputy prime minister. Nevertheless, as documented by a Pew Research report released in April, just over a tenth of the country’s population supports making sharia the law of the land, compared to three-fourths of Muslims in Egypt.

After the 1980 military coup, the generals provided a further spur to Islamization, introducing such measures as compulsory religious instruction in state schools, training more imams and opening scores of religious academies. As Stephen Kinzer put it in his book Crescent and Star (2001), “The dour generals who seized power in September 1980 hoped to use Islam as a counterweight to secular liberal and radical ideologies that were gaining strength in Turkey.” After deadlocked elections in 1995, Erbakan became prime minister in a coalition government. Once in office, he ostentatiously thumbed his nose at the generals, denounced the West and solidarized with the Iranian theocracy. Erbakan was forced to resign in 1997, and his Welfare Party was banned from politics. Although Erbakan was sentenced to prison, he was amnestied and served no time. But fellow Islamist Erdogan was convicted of subversion and jailed for four months.

Although they suffered a setback, the Islamists were not crushed. In 2002, Erdogan’s AKP was elected to office. Erdogan was careful to cultivate an image as a “moderate” Islamist and a “democrat.” He pushed Turkey’s application to join the European Union (EU) and enacted some minor reforms in Kurdistan, allowing use of Kurdish in private—but not state—schools and very limited Kurdish language radio broadcasts. This played well in the West and won high praise from various bourgeois pundits.

Meanwhile, Erdogan was going after his enemies among the Kemalist generals, recognizing that they were a threat to consolidating his authority. Using the courts and other institutions, he gradually purged the officer corps. Thus in Turkey the army is now subordinated to the Islamists. This is manifestly different from the situation in Egypt.

As Erdogan became more secure in his position, he increasingly geared up the repressive machinery of the state against anyone who appeared to be an opponent. By 2005, the AKP government had stepped up military repression in Kurdistan, leading the PKK to end its five-year cease-fire. Turkey also began bombing PKK camps in Iraq. Meanwhile, “anti-terror” laws have been used to persecute thousands of union activists, students, lawyers, journalists and university teachers.

Under Erdogan, one of the most infamous provisions in the Turkish constitution, Article 301, was “reformed” so that now it is a crime to insult the Turkish nation as opposed to insulting “Turkishness”—a distinction with absolutely no difference. In October 2005, Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was given a six-month suspended sentence under Article 301 for writing about the 1915 massacre of Armenians. Dink was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist for whom Article 301 was a passport to murder. Several dozen members of the teachers union Egitim Sen, which has an honorable record of defending the right to education in one’s own language, were detained for months on bogus charges under anti-terrorism legislation and still face charges.

Erdogan has embarked on a massive building program, often with the theme of celebrating Ottoman times. An example is the shopping mall complex designed to supplant Gezi Park, with an artillery barracks of that period and a mosque. Developers have targeted poorer inner-city neighborhoods, driving Kurds, Roma (Gypsies) and others to slums beyond the city limits.

The Islamist regime has also stepped up provocations against the Alevi minority. Composing up to 25 percent of the population, the Alevis are an unorthodox offshoot of Shi’ite Islam who are seen as advocates of secularism and are disproportionately represented on the left. Alevi men and women worship together; women are not covered. Alevis do not fast during Ramadan and do not normally pray in mosques or accept the Koran as a source of jurisprudence. The government is naming a third bridge being built over the Bosphorus after the Ottoman ruler Yavuz Sultan Selim. Known as Selim the Grim because of his cruelty, he massacred tens of thousands of Alevis in the 16th century. Predictably the naming of the bridge outraged the Alevis. Considered heretics by Sunni traditionalists, they continue to be targeted today.

Turkey’s Regional Ambitions

Turkey remains, as it has been for many decades, a staunch ally of the Western imperialists. Bordering on the former Soviet Union, it served as a valuable listening post for the U.S. after World War II. A staunch NATO ally, Turkey dispatched troops to fight alongside the imperialists in the Korean War. While the U.S. is the largest military supporter of Turkey, the Turkish capitalists are economically dependent on German imperialism, exporting more to that country than anywhere else. Germany has also trained and drilled Turkish military death squads deployed in Kurdistan.

After coming to power, Erdogan heavily pushed the virtues of the European Union, portraying membership as the road to economic prosperity. The International Communist League has consistently opposed the EU, which is an imperialist cartel whose purpose is to enforce austerity on European workers and to act as a tool for the larger powers, particularly Germany, to exploit weaker, dependent capitalist states. The gloss has long since worn off the EU, especially in light of the grinding capitalist economic crisis. The rapidly worsening living conditions in Europe, particularly in Spain, Greece, Cyprus and elsewhere in the EU’s southern rim, demonstrate that talk of the “growing together” of Europe has nothing to do with raising poorer countries to the level of richer nations but rather enables increased capitalist exploitation.

While many Kurds have expressed illusions that the EU would defend minority rights, the fact is that EU states have viciously persecuted immigrants and ethnic minorities, such as the Basques in Spain and France and the Catholics in Northern Ireland. Moreover, both the U.S. and the EU have banned the PKK as a “terrorist organization.” The ICL demands freedom for Öcalan and opposes the banning of the PKK. We have also called for defense of Turkish Guevarists, such as the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), and other leftists persecuted as part of the “anti-terrorism” witchhunt.

It is highly questionable whether the racist and bigoted European rulers would ever grant EU membership to a large, overwhelmingly Muslim country like Turkey, whose citizens would have the right to travel and work in EU states. In any event, the EU continues to put up new obstacles to Turkey’s entry. With the AKP’s goal of EU entry stalled, Erdogan’s “neo-Ottomanism” has put particular stress on developing influence where the Sultanate once held sway or where Turkic languages are spoken, an area stretching from Bosnia in the Balkans to the Near East and Central Asia. While Europe remains Turkey’s largest trade partner, from 2002 to 2010 trade with the Gulf states increased fivefold and with Egypt sevenfold. Receiving foreign capital investment from the Persian Gulf states, Turkey’s construction companies as well as food and textile concerns have in turn invested in the rest of the Near East.

Erdogan’s Turkey has lined up with the Sunni Arab states and the Western imperialists in a bloc whose principal target is Shi’ite Iran. Thus the AKP government sides with the Syrian rebels against the bonapartist regime of Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian ally. A conduit for arms to the rebels, Turkey successfully pushed for stationing NATO Patriot missiles on its soil. However, Erdogan’s war course is deeply unpopular in Turkey, with widespread fears that the country may become militarily involved. As Marxists, we say that both sides in the communally based Syrian civil war are deeply reactionary enemies of the working class. But in the event that the U.S. and/or European powers launch a military attack on Syria, working people internationally must stand with Syria against the imperialist forces.

Turkey has substantial relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, where Turkish firms have the vast bulk of construction contracts. Iraqi Kurdistan is now a semi-autonomous enclave whose protected status is largely due to the support it has gotten from U.S. imperialism. Oil is about to flow from newly exploited fields in Iraqi Kurdistan via pipeline to Turkey, angering Iraq’s majority Shi’ite government, which complains that it is not getting a fair share of the revenues. Meanwhile, many of the PKK’s fighters have migrated to Iraqi Kurdistan. Should fighting break out again between Turkey and the PKK, the pro-American Iraqi Kurdish leaders could well hunt down PKK militants, as they have done in the past.

There is a long history of mutual backstabbing among rival Kurdish nationalist groups pursuing advantages with the imperialists or one or another regional capitalist state. We stressed during the U.S. occupation of Iraq that “any fight for Kurdish independence that does not take as its starting point opposition to the occupation and to the nationalist parties that serve it will necessarily be subordinated to the occupation” (“The U.S. Occupation and the Kurdish Question,” WV No. 871, 26 May 2006). The article continued:

“As part of the multinational proletariat of the Near East, Kurdish workers can play a leading role in bringing down the rotten structure set up to serve the imperialist overlords. Kurdish and Turkish workers in Europe, especially in Germany, can serve as a living bridge linking the Kurdish struggle for independence to the fight for socialist revolution in the Near East and the advanced capitalist countries of West Europe.”

This struggle requires the leadership of internationalist workers parties forged in opposition to all bourgeois forces and all forms of religious reaction.