The movement against the authoritarian neo-liberal Erdogan government in Turkey continues in multiple forms despite heavy repression and heavier threats.
It started with a small environmentalist protest against the plans to bulldoze Gezi Park, next to Taksim Square in central Istanbul, and build a shopping mall on the site. It spread after 28 May when the first small protest was attacked with tear gas and water cannon.
As we go to press on 20 June, a Turkish socialist tweets: “Tonight [Wednesday 19th] there are forums in 27 Istanbul parks. Amazing atmosphere”. Since Monday 17 June thousands have also protested in public spaces across Turkey by simply standing silent, following a first such gesture by performance artist Erdem Gunduz in Taksim Square.
Workers organised by the KESK public service union and the DISK union confederation joined the protests by striking on Monday 17 June. Police stopped workers gathering in large numbers, but there were still street protests.
According to the workers’ association UID-DER, workers’ slogans included: “Working people call the AKP to account”, “This is only the start; the struggle continues”, “Call killer police to account”, “Victory to the resistance”, “General strike, global resistance”, “Long live class solidarity”, “End police violence”.
As the Guardian (16 June) put it, prime minister Erdogan “ditched all efforts at conciliation”, when he convened and addressed a mass rally of supporters on Sunday 16th. He denounced the protesters as “terrorists, anarchists, rioters”. Simultaneously cops were using tear gas and water cannon to drive protesters out of Gezi Park and Taksim Square. Erdogan had made a concession by agreeing that the bulldozing of Gezi Park would be delayed, and not proceed without a referendum, but he knew that the protests had gone beyond that issue, and wanted to assert that he would offer no more.
Erdogan’s deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc spelled it out on TV: “If the police are not enough, there are the gendarmes [militarised police]; if the gendarmes are not enough... there are the armed forces”.
“Those who manipulate public opinion and guide demonstrations on Twitter and Facebook will be revealed”, added interior minister Muammer Guler.
On Tuesday 18th, according to the Guardian, “the Turkish police swooped on dozens of hard-left activists, arresting more than 90 people”. Other reports indicate hundreds, not dozens of arrests. The BBC reports Turkish lawyers as saying that “close to 500 people have been detained... Some lawyers have not been given access to their clients [or even] do not know where they are being held... [The] president of the Turkish medical association told the BBC that five doctors and three nurses had gone missing after treating injured protesters”.
A new article by the Turkish socialist group Marksist Tutum analyses the clashes as produced by the growing confidence and power of “the AKP bourgeoisie”. This is a new “upstart” layer of the capitalist class, drawn often from the rural middle class, which has prospered alongside the old state-centred bourgeoisie since the AKP took office in 2002.
The frame for its rise was set not by the AKP, but by the bloody military coup of 1980 and the Thatcherite “Ozal period” which followed it. “Outsourcing and union-busting activities within the framework of a neo-liberal economic programme” have continued under the AKP, and “provided a comfortable environment for upstart bourgeois exploitation”.
The AKP also wanted to push back the military from the overbearing role in politics which it had had since the foundation of the modern Turkish state in 1923. It wanted to get Turkey into the EU, and it wants to negotiate a settlement with Turkey’s Kurdish minority, which the old military-dominated regimes dealt with just by denying the existence of any Kurdish identity in Turkey.
Thus, up to and including the 2011 election, the AKP deliberately sought alliances with liberals. It used slogans like “advanced democracy”, “civil constitution”, and “expansion of freedom”, and even carried out some measures along those lines, though not much in the sphere of workers’ rights.
Now the military has been tamed by the AKP sufficiently that it feels confident to use it as a threat against the street protests. The AKP no longer needs alliances with liberals, and it is under pressure from the global capitalist crisis.
The workers’ association UID-DER comments: “The AKP government is establishing a regime of increasingly repressive and police state conditions... Our response should be based on the following polarisation: on the one side, the bosses, and the parties defending profit; and on the other, all those defending the interests of workers and their workers’ organisations”.
