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CHAPTER 1
A Pattern of Violence
'This is a Bloodstained Square'
The moment the first of the two bombs goes off is captured on a video clip: a group of young people are joined together in an embrace, performing a traditional Anatolian folk dance. Eerily, they are singing 'This is a bloodstained square'. They exude happiness, however, and the atmosphere is festive. Then, suddenly, there is a blast behind them. There are flames, and the blue, sunny sky is shrouded by a cloud of smoke that quickly expands. The dancers cast a quick glance backwards before diving for cover. The picture is blurred.
On 10 October 2015, over one hundred leftist peace activists, Turks and Kurds, were blown up in Ankara. They were assembling on the square next to the train station in Ankara when the two suicide bombers struck. The activists had heeded the calls of several trade unions and of the pro-Kurdish and socialist Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) to protest against the war that the Turkish military was waging against Turkey's own Kurdish citizens in the south-east of the country, laying waste to entire towns. The massacre in Ankara is the deadliest terrorist attack in Turkey to date. Yet it was anything but atypical in terms of what it stood for politically. The carnage fitted all too well into a pattern of mass killings since the late 1960s: the victims are invariably leftists, other democrats, or ethnic and religious minorities. The perpetrators are drawn from the country's deep, popular reservoir of ultra-conservatives and ultra-nationalists. Those who commission the massacres and the assassinations lurk in the shadows.
The Ankara massacre followed on the killing of over 30 young socialists in a suicide bombing a few months earlier. On both occasions, the authorities identified the perpetrators as Turkish citizens who they claimed had acted on behalf of the so-called 'Islamic State'. The latter, however, did not claim responsibility for the Ankara massacre. Progressives and liberals felt they had good reason to suspect that the suicide bombers in Ankara had acted with the encouragement, or at very least the protection, of the Turkish state. To many, it seemed obvious that history was repeating itself, that elements of the infamous Turkish 'deep state' – the right-wing networks of conspirators and assassins embedded within the state – had been reactivated to crush the Kurdish and Turkish left. Hasan Cemal, a prominent liberal journalist, wrote that he harboured no doubt at all that President Erdogan's regime had brought the instruments of the deep state back into use.
The lyrics of the song that was interrupted at the peace rally in Ankara in 2015 – 'This is a bloodstained square' – referred to Beyaz?t Square in Istanbul, where two young leftist demonstrators were slain by a fascist mob on 16 February 1969. Establishing a pattern that was to be repeated many times, the police stood by passively, and the perpetrators, none of whom were brought to justice, were defended by a right-wing government that blamed the victims for what had happened. In the same vein, the Islamic conservative government in 2015 displayed no empathy for the victims, instead accusing the organizers of the rally of having deliberately willed the carnage, supposedly with the purpose of destabilizing the government. Again in accordance with the historical pattern, no security measures whatsoever had been taken to protect the rally, and, according to the Association of Turkish Doctors, the intervention of the police – firing tear gas over the site of the massacre – caused the deaths of several of the wounded.
The 'Bloodstained Sunday' of 1969, as it became known, was immortalized by the left-wing folk singer Ruhi Su. The cultural life of Turkey has historically been dominated by the left, but the Turkish state has also been pitiless in its persecution of those who have been the leading embodiments of the country's culture, and Su was no exception. He was pursuing a career at the Turkish State Opera when in 1952 he was sentenced to prison for five years for having been a member of the banned Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). The Turkish state persecuted Su until his death, indeed caused it. Diagnosed with cancer, he applied for a passport in order to be able to travel to Europe for treatment; his request was turned down, and when the authorities finally acquiesced, it was too late for him to be cured. The 'Bloodstained Sunday' that Ruhi Su helped to immortalize was the starting point of a decade of right-wing violence. Its purpose was to intimidate the left and derail the social democratic movement that was on the rise during the first half of the 1970s. These goals were achieved. The violence in Turkey during the 1970s drew little international attention, and this is also a period that is glossed over in accounts of modern Turkish history. Yet it was a momentous era, and we will return to it later.
On International Labour Day in 1977, Istanbul's Taksim Square was the site of carnage. A crowd of several hundred thousand had gathered when unidentified assassins opened fire from the high-rise blocks that surround the square. At least 40 were killed. In 1978, hundreds of Alevis were massacred in the cities of Kahramanmara? and Çorum. The Alevis are heterodox Muslims whose syncretistic creed amalgamates elements of Shiite Islam, pre-Islamic traditions and Anatolian popular culture; in social terms, they have historically belonged to the underprivileged. They are estimated to make up perhaps as much as 15 to 20 per cent of the population of Turkey, and there are Turkish as well as Kurdish Alevis. The Alevis have been the victims of social and religious discrimination and oppression for centuries, from the days of Ottoman rule up to the present. This has made them a natural, left-leaning constituency; they present a parallel to the similarly socially underprivileged and traditionally oppressed Shiites in Iraq and Lebanon, who used to provide communist parties with a strong popular base in those countries. Hasan Fehmi Güne?, a social democrat who served as interior minister in 1978, later bore witness that the National Intelligence Agency of the state had in fact armed and directed the Sunni mob that carried out the massacres of the Alevis. The complicity, or at the very least criminal negligence, of the Turkish state was again on display in 1993: this time, Alevis and leftists were attacked by a Sunni mob in the city of Sivas. A hotel where a group of leftist writers – most of whom were Alevis – had gathered for a culture event, was set on fire. The police and the gendarmerie passively stood by, doing nothing to disperse the mob or to prevent it from starting the fire. Thirty-five were killed.
As just noted, the campaign of fascist violence in the 1970s went largely unnoticed by international opinion; the contrast is stark between lack of attention given to the 1977 Labour Day massacre on Istanbul's Taksim Square and the international reaction in 2013 to the crushing of the Gezi protests, the environmentalist action to save the park that borders the square. The Gezi protests and their crushing became a world event. The action initiated by a middle-class, radical youth swelled into a popular mass protest when the working class, mostly Alevis, joined the rallies in Istanbul and across Turkey. Not coincidentally, all of the casualties – 14 protesters were killed by the police – were Alevis. Hundreds of the protesters suffered serious injuries, many of them losing eyes. The Gezi protests were a turning point: the ruthless violence deployed against peaceful protesters ruined the international image of Erdogan, a conservative who until then had been taken to be a democratic reformer by global, liberal opinion. Only a year earlier the US president Barack Obama had listed Erdogan among the five world leaders with whom he said he had been able to forge 'friendships and the bonds of trust'. The Gezi events spoiled the Obama?Erdogan relationship. The US president was reported to be deeply disappointed; more importantly, Erdogan had now become a political liability, and for a time Obama refused to take any phone calls from his once trusted friend.
For years, the general consensus among international observers was that Erdogan's mission was to make Turkey democratic. This belief reflected a deep ignorance of Turkish history. Otherwise it would not have come as a surprise that yet another Turkish conservative leader turned out to be an authoritarian who did not flinch from using violence against leftists and minorities. But the fundamental, right-wing character of the repression and state violence in Turkey is rarely, if ever, recognized in the standard histories. The fact that Turkey is authoritarian is conventionally accounted for either by the putative secularist ambitions of the erstwhile so-called Kemalist state elite or, as is recently the case with Erdogan's regime, by the Islamist ideology of its rulers. The right-wing continuity from Kemalists to Islamists is never acknowledged.
'May those who love the fatherland strike at the communists!' Thus exhorted the mouthpiece of the one-party regime of the Republican People's Party, Vatan, on 3 December 1945. Readers of the Vatan editorial well understood who the 'communists' in question were: the publishers of the left-wing daily Tan. The newspaper had drawn the ire of the regime of President Ismet Inönü, who had succeeded Kemal Atatürk in 1938, because it called for better relations between Turkey and the Soviet Union. In the eyes of the regime, it was a fifth column. This was a time when Joseph Stalin, emboldened after the Soviet victory in the Second World War, postured aggressively against Turkey, to which the Inönü regime was responding by mounting a witch-hunt against left-wing intellectuals, purging left-wing academics, and by mobilizing religion as a counter-weight to the perceived threat from the left, as I will describe later. The Vatan editorial calling for patriots to strike at the communists was distributed among the students at Istanbul University, to immediate effect. The next day, 4 December 1945, the students performed their 'patriotic duty': they marched to and stormed the press of the Tan and wrecked it as the police looked on. They continued their rampage by smashing the press of another left-wing publication, owned by the writer Sabahattin Ali, who was murdered by the Turkish secret service three years later. Among the right-wing rioters who heeded the call of the organ of the Kemalist regime were no less than three future presidents and prime ministers, Süleyman Demirel, Turgut Özal and Necmettin Erbakan, two conservatives and one Islamist. The right-wing parentage of Kemalism, conservatism and Islamism is perfectly illustrated.
At a superficial glance, it would appear that modern Turkish history has been defined by discontinuity, as I noted in the introduction. The country has been ruled by generals and civilians, by secularists and Islamic conservatives; there was a break with Islamic tradition when the state was founded, while lately Islam is held to have triumphed over secularism with Erdogan. On the face of it, he is the antithesis of the 'founding father' of the Turkish state, Atatürk. But this narrative line misses the political lineage that connects the two. Atatürk was of course a cultural radical, while Erdogan is a social and cultural conservative, not to say a reactionary. What escapes attention, though, is the affinity of their class politics: Atatürk was a bourgeois radical, while Erdogan is a bourgeois conservative. These distinctions are obviously not insignificant, but they do not change the fact these are two variants of a bourgeois ideology that has held sway and served the same class interests since the founding of Turkey. The dominant class interests have only been challenged once: Bülent Ecevit, the only social democrat who has served as prime minister of Turkey, mounted a leftist challenge to the system, and typically, he is ignored by the standard history. In this book though, he will be getting the attention that he deserves.
The personalities of political leaders, the contingent nature of politics, and the power struggles within the elite must all be taken into account in exploring the logic of the authoritarianism that has persisted in Turkey. But, as the following pages will make clear, it is capitalist dynamics that, on a structural level, have sustained authoritarianism from Atatürk to Erdogan. There is also another historical pattern that stands out: Turkey has a way of generating what turn out to be false hopes. Just as liberals, in Turkey and beyond, expected democratic wonders from Erdogan, so did leftists entertain illusions about the 'progressive' Atatürk. The country's genesis – its rise out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War – was greeted with high expectations by those, socialists and communists alike, who, as it would turn out, were soon to suffer terribly under a state that was conceived as an engine of bourgeois interests.
In the next section, after a brief historical detour, we will meet the first group of those victims: Mustafa Suphi, the founding leader of the Communist Party of Turkey, and his 14 comrades, who were murdered on 28 January 1921. In hindsight, these brutal murders stand out as an emblematic act of political violence. They were an early revelation of the ideological identity of the state founded by Atatürk, and, in a sense, they set the tone for the violence and repression that has since ensued.
Opening Act: 28 January 1921
Was the Russian Revolution going to be followed by a Turkish Revolution? Along with the Russian Empire and the Romanovs' centuries-old dynasty, and Austria-Hungary, the empire of the Habsburgs, the First World War had also undone the Ottoman Empire, known as the 'sick man of Europe' since the mid nineteenth century. In 1914, the empire included what are now Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. When the war ended in 1918, the same Western powers that rushed to strangle the Bolsheviks in Russia hurried to carve up the territory of the defeated Ottoman Empire and wipe it off the map. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, no friend of the Turks, was in the driving seat of the endeavour. He encouraged Greece to invade Anatolia. The British and the French divided the Arab provinces between them. They occupied the capital Constantinople. Greek troops took possession of Smyrna (today Izmir), the second largest city, which had a Greek majority.
Thirty-five sultans had succeeded to the throne since their forefather Osman, a tribal chief of Central Asian origin, had founded an emirate at the north-western edge of Anatolia at the end of the thirteenth century. Anatolia, Anadolu in Turkish, is the peninsula of which more than 90 per cent of the territory of Turkey consists, except for a small piece of geographically European territory, eastern Thrace. The word Anatolia originates in Greek, and means 'where the sun rises', but for Greeks and Europeans the peninsular region has more commonly been known as Asia Minor. For two millennia, from Antiquity to the twelfth century, when tribes from Central Asia entered the scene, Anatolia was part of the Hellenistic world. It should be noted that present-day national and political denominations are misleading when applied retroactively to describe historical societal evolutions over centuries, not to speak of over millennia: both the contemporary Greek and Turkish national identities are modern constructions, dating from respectively the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century. 'Turk' is a particularly ambiguous label which is applied all too liberally to a wide variety of peoples throughout space and time, from the Ottomans to the Bosnian Muslims that Serbs and Croats still pejoratively continue to call 'Turks', to the Christian Arabs who migrated to Latin America from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, whose descendants are even today referred to as Turcos. The Argentinian president in the early 1990s, Carlos Menem, was one of these and was thus called El Turco.
Even though Europeans have always referred to the Ottoman Empire as 'Turkey', and to the Ottomans as 'Turks', its own rulers never thought of themselves as Turks. Indeed, they were not, in the modern sense. The Ottoman founder Osman's tribe were among the Central Asian tribes that had entered Anatolia at the end of the eleventh century. The people that make up the Turkish nation today have a vast variety of ethnic origins.
When the Central Asian tribes settled in Anatolia they mixed with the Byzantine-era Christian population of the peninsula. The Central Asian tribes are estimated to have added maybe 10 per cent to the Anatolian population. In the course of 150 years, the small Ottoman emirate had expanded into a world power. The Ottoman armies conquered the Balkans, rode into the old Byzantine capital Constantinople in 1453 and reached far into Europe; they were halted only at the gates of Vienna. The Black Sea became an Ottoman lake; almost the whole extent of North Africa, from Algeria to Egypt, came under Ottoman rule.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why Turkey is Authoritarian"
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Copyright © 2018 Halil Karaveli.
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