The people of Turkey, aided by a long history of organisation and resistance, fiercely resisted the US invasion of Iraq, successfully blocking many of their government's attempts to provide support to the invaders. Taylan Bilgic from the foreign news desk of Evrensel, the daily newspaper of the Turkish Party of Labour (EMEP), spoke to Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly's Karen Fletcher at the Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference in Sydney at Easter.
The Turkish Party of Labour was established in 1996, following a period from 1989 during which many thousands of workers engaged in mass resistance against the laws of the military junta. The peak of that resistance was the Zonguldak miners' strike and march followed by a massive general strike in 1991. The workers leading that resistance started to talk about the need for an open and legal working-class party.
The party is similar to traditional communist parties — for example it operates on Leninist democratic centralist principles — but it also differs in many ways. It does not see itself as the "vanguard" of the working class, but as a mass party that is open to all workers and as a school in which workers learn to engage in politics. Workers with only a vague idea of Marxism or socialism can quickly become branch leaders in our party.
More than 60% of our members are workers, as are more than 70% of our branch leaders. Big manufacturing centres are the main areas of activity for our party. In Turkey, wherever there is a strike, wherever there is working-class resistance, our party is always there organising, helping or defending the struggle. We now have a very respected position in the working class, unionised and non-unionised.
Evrensel [a daily newspaper with circulation around 10,000] was founded because the working-class movement needed an open, mass propaganda mechanism. A daily newspaper means that you can rebuild the world every morning. You interpret the world day-by-day from a socialist perspective. This is the opposite of what the bourgeois media must do — which is to convince the masses that the world will always be the same, nothing will change and nobody can do anything about it. Our newspaper says things can be changed and that we have the power to change them if we organise ourselves.
Evrensel has been publishing for 10 years now. We have been shut down many times and been through many name changes but everyone knows who we are. Our journalists have been imprisoned, tortured and even killed in the course of our struggle to publish
The closures of our newspaper have mainly been related to our support for the Kurdish issue. Our party and our paper put great emphasis on the Kurdish question — which distinguishes us from other parties on the socialist left in Turkey. Most left parties shy away from this issue because they think that if they open it up too much, the workers will reject them. Turkish workers generally don't know a lot about the Kurdish issue, and they are bombarded with a lot of chauvinist propaganda. But Evrensel does not shy away. More than 50,000 people have been killed over this issue in the last decade. More than 3000 villages have been burned down. Millions of Kurdish peasants have been driven from their village homes into big cities like Istanbul, with no money and no jobs, and they still live in horrible conditions — sometimes 10 to 20 people to a room. This is an issue that the working class must solve, because there is no other force that can solve it.
In the Emergency Rule region [11 Kurd-dominated provinces that were placed under martial law from 1987] our newspaper was banned from when it was launched in 1996 until the end of Emergency Rule in 2003. This also happened to the pro-Kurdish newspaper Gundem. They suffered much more than us of course — they lost 20 people including editors, columnists, journalists and sellers of the newspaper to the police and the military. Many of these crimes have still not been punished. Since Emergency Rule ended — due to pressure from the European Union and the ceasefire by the Kurdistan Workers Party [PKK] — we are now able to sell our newspaper in those regions. We now have a page of Kurdish news.
The European Union, when it declares that Turkey is now a country that respects human rights, knows that it is not true. It is trying to deceive the people of Europe and of the world. There have been some changes, for example if you speak Kurdish in the street no-one should harass you now. There are now Kurdish broadcasts on state TV of around one hour per week. These are mainly nature documentaries — nothing about the real situation for Kurds. The translation is horrible. Kurdish people are not interested in the broadcasts. They still watch a Kurdish satellite station, broadcast from Brussels, or Kurdish broadcasts from Iraq.
Millions of Kurds have been displaced [by the Turkish government] in recent decades. There have been only 20,000 or so returnees. Much of their property has been destroyed and their land taken over by big landlords. So it is not enough just for them to return — there must be support for reconstruction. There are currently more than 7000 Kurdish political prisoners in Turkish jails, accused of being guerrillas or supporters of the guerrillas. These include the leader of the Kurdish movement, Abdullah Ocalan.
Democratic rights are, in essence, political rights — not just cultural rights. Where is the right of the Kurds to organise themselves in a political party? The Kurdish party has been closed down many times. It is still illegal for a party to call for Kurdish self-determination. The police forces cannot tolerate Kurdish political action.
The situation for press freedom is getting worse. There is a new criminal code being discussed in parliament that will further enable punishment of the media for what it writes. Individuals, such as the prime minister, will be able to launch lawsuits against newspapers, demanding big sums of money. Our newspaper has been fined 15 billion Turkish lira for a cartoon — which is a big sum for a newspaper like ours. We do not have that money. Two weeks ago the prime minister launched a suit against a weekly cartoon magazine for 45 billion lira. This is the new democracy.
Our party and our newspaper are against the European Union. We see it as a union of monopolies and big European capital, which is of no use to Turkish, Kurdish or European people. Masses of European people protest every year against the rules imposed on them by Brussels — such as the Maastricht criteria.
However, this position does not mean that we can't form political alliances with forces that support Turkish entry into the EU. For example, the pro-Kurdish party, DEHAP, supports the EU, thinking that it will bring greater democracy. We do not agree on that, but we still maintain a strong alliance with it. It's a tricky question for us because there has been so much propaganda that people now think the EU will mean welfare, higher wages and the right to organise. But in other European countries there has been a decline in all these areas.
When we talk with people we say we know they might support the EU because they expect welfare and democracy from them. We respect these demands but we do not believe that these can be given by the EU — we have to win them ourselves — so let's leave aside the EU question and fight together. In a few years people will see that the EU's project is to push the whole of Europe back to the condition of the Eastern European countries.
The main focus of our party is the unity of the working class. We turn our face towards ordinary working people — whatever their political convictions. But this does not mean that we are not interested in building political alliances with other left forces. On the contrary, our party and our newspaper have been supporters of long- and short-term alliances from the beginning. We have had a very successful electoral alliance called the Labour, Democracy and Peace Block, comprising the Party of Labour, DEHAP and another small socialist party, the SDP. These three forces came together and created a bigger impact than they could have achieved individually.
We got around 6.2% of the vote in the national elections, around 2 million votes, but we did not get a seat in the parliament because of the electoral system in Turkey under which you have to get at least 10% to be entitled to one. If we had a bigger coalition — and we tried hard on that — we might have got the vote we needed and put some Turkish and Kurdish workers into the parliament.
We also had an anti-war coalition which included many political parties, trade unions and professional organisations and some sincere Islamic organisations. This alliance also continues now.
The problem is to build some long-term alliances. We are pushing for the Labour, Democracy and Peace Block to be a permanent electoral alliance. There are some problems we are encountering in daily work within the alliance, but wherever possible we try to do things together, with their people and our people. This breaks down prejudices and barriers between us. We learn a lot from the Kurdish party, especially from their women's organisation, which is very strong. They also learn from us some political organising methods. It is a very fruitful alliance but now we need to make it permanent.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, April 27, 2005.
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