Turkey: Chronicle of a Crisis Foretold

By Sungur Savran

The month of Ramadan is traditionally calmer politically in Turkey than other times. Not so this time around. The month of October started with a series of declarations by the top brass of the Turkish armed forces. In unison, they condemned what they perceive as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the attacks on the prerogatives of the army in Turkish political life and the support given to the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla movement, by foreign powers. Even in a country long seasoned in periodically staged military coups and thinly veiled interventions in political life, this was perceived universally as a threat from the high command of further things to come.

Although the top brass criticised many forces, including the European Union, everyone knew that the major object of the attack was the government. For Turkey has now entered the final stage of what we, Workers' Struggle, have for some time now been calling the "political civil war of the bourgeoisie". In six months' time, i.e. in April 2006, the term of office of the present president of the republic will come to an end and the new president will be elected. The problem is that it is parliament that is going to elect the new president. And the parliament is overwhelmingly dominated by the AKP, the mildly Islamic party of Prime Minister Erdogan, who has set his eyes on the post himself. This is extremely unpalatable to the armed forces, posturing as the guardians of the "secular and unitary republic". If Erdogan persists in pursuing the presidential post, the army is almost sure to intervene in the process to stop him from conquering the one post that has traditionally been considered the reserved hunting ground of the secular establishment. Hence, to borrow from the Chronicle of a Death Foretold of Marquez, if there was ever a pre-announced national political crisis in history, it could not have beaten the present situation in Turkey in precision!

The inner contradictions of the bourgeoisie

Behind this seemingly institutional conflict between the AKP government and the army lies a contradiction in the very bosom of the bourgeoisie in Turkey. Ever since the foundation of the republic in 1923 under Kemal Atatürk, the mainstream bourgeoisie has turned its face to the West and tried to integrate economically, politically, militarily and culturally with imperialism, European and, later, American. The country has been a member of NATO since 1952, of the OECD and the Council of Europe from their inception, and is now a candidate for accession to the EU. However, since the 1970s, the fledgling bourgeoisie of the vast provincial hinterland of Anatolia (or Asia Minor) has been competing economically and fighting politically the dominant pro-Western wing of Istanbul and a few other big cities. This bourgeoisie has adopted a markedly Islamist orientation. The two wings of the bourgeoisie even have their own economic umbrella organisations, TÜSIAD representing Western-oriented finance capital and MÜSIAD the Islamic-oriented fraction of the bourgeoisie, which, over the decades, has itself risen to the status of finance capital. In the political arena, as well, a succession of Islamist parties has vied for power. The Islamists of Erbakan finally came to power in 1996. This resulted in a first battle between the two wings. In 1997, a thinly disguised military intervention, based on an alliance of the military and the Western-oriented bourgeoisie, at the instigation of the US, disturbed by the openings of the government to the Iranian and Libyan regimes, and with the servile support of the trade-union bureaucracy, brought down the government and, through the services of the Constitutional Court, banned the Islamist party. The AKP was born in 2001 as a cross-breed of Islamism and liberalism and has followed exactly the same policies that any right-wing party would have since it came to power in a landslide victory at the end of 2002. With two exceptions.

One is the fatal mistake the party committed on the eve of the war on Iraq. On March 1, partly under the pressure of the unitary anti-war movement, many AKP members of parliament voted against the government motion stipulating the use of Turkish territory by US troops to attack Iraq from the north. This drew the wrath of the United States, which had supported the AKP government generously up to that point. The AKP has been trying to make up for this since then. The fact that parliament voted for troops to be sent to Lebanon at the beginning of September despite an overwhelming anti-Israeli sentiment in Turkey is the latest manifestation of this effort by the party to cater to the needs of US imperialist policy to curry favour from the Bush administration. However, the inevitable ambiguities and vacillations of a pro-Islamic party in this age of imperialist permanent war seem to have turned the US administration against the AKP. (An advisor to Erdogan was lately quoted as imploring US officials unabashedly "not to flush him [i.e. Erdogan] down the drain".) The fact that Hamas leader Meshal was received in Ankara by the foreign minister after the elections in Palestine raised the ire of Israel. The vacillations concerning Iran make the AKP an unreliable partner at the helm of one of the most important military allies of the US in the Middle East, the only power on a par with Iran, if one leaves aside Israel.

This is why Erdogan visited Bush in the White House in early October. This is in fact why the military top brass stormed the government with their tirades exactly at a time when the prime minister was in Washington. Both sides are competing for the favours of the White House in the coming showdown in April. Given that the Turkish military have been reliable partners all throughout the period of Turkey's membership in NATO and that they have taken a much more militant stand against Iran than the AKP, it is highly likely that the US will throw its weight behind the army in this political civil war of the bourgeoisie in Turkey.

All the more so, since the pro-Western wing of the bourgeoisie has changed its position regarding the AKP government. And this is related to the second difference AKP policy has displayed from other right-wing parties. After a decade of weak coalition governments, the solid majority obtained by the AKP in 2002, added to the fact that the party had toned down Islamic references and committed itself to neo-liberalism and integration with the West, had lured the bourgeoisie into supporting the new government in the name of political and economic stability. However, despite its pruned Islamism the AKP has to at least pay lip service to its Islamist constituency. This it did in very parsimonious manner. However, even this limited opening to Islamism was enough to alienate the pro-Western bourgeoisie from the AKP. The problem was compounded by the appointment of Islamist cadres to all the significant posts of the bureaucracy at the expense of cadres loyal to Turkey's pro-Western trajectory. The dogged insistence of the government to replace the man of confidence of the pro-Western bourgeoisie at the head of the Central Bank last year was the last straw. In a certain sense, the bourgeoisie sees the attempt by Erdogan to rise to the presidency as a culmination of this same trend.

Aggravating circumstances

So we have here a coalition of the same forces that brought down the previous Islamist government in 1997. The problem is that Erdogan has the staunch parliamentary majority that the previous government did not (that one was a coalition government.) Apart from the minor possibility of Erdogan yielding the ground to avoid a crisis, a head on clash between the two camps seems inevitable in spring 2007. The crisis will be made all the deeper for Turkey is also grappling with other, almost equally daunting problems. There is first the Kurdish question. Despite a new cease-fire declared by the PKK, the future looks extremely uncertain in this area. Given the extremely chauvinistic ideological climate consciously fanned by the state, the situation may, at any moment, degenerate into an all-out civil strife and massacre of Kurds by lynch-thirsty mobs. The fascists of the MHP have been exploiting the chauvinism rampant among the Turkish masses for the last year and a half in attempted lynch events throughout Western Turkey. Fascism, in effect, is the political force that stands to gain exceptionally from the impasse facing the Turkish political system.

There are also the tremendous risks that Turkey will face as a result of the war in the Middle East. The Turkish establishment talks with one voice concerning the threat posed by a possible nuclear threat from Iran, totally hiding from the workers and the oppressed the concrete and present threat posed by Israeli nuclear arms! There is, finally, the prospect of a new economic crash, after the earth-shaking economic crisis of 2001. Turkey is very highly indebted, has a huge current account deficit and is extremely dependent on so-called "hot money", which can pull out at the first panic on international markets, leaving behind immense devastation. A glimpse of this scenario was provided when the Turkish lira lost around one third of its value during the commotion in international markets this May.

All is quiet on the workers' front

All in all, Turkey is entering a period of a political (and possibly economic) crisis of formidable proportions. The so-called social democrats are simply acting as the parliamentary front of the armed forces, replicating the anti-Islamist rhetoric of the latter in even more caricaturised forms. The Kurdish movement, despite the explosive mood of the Kurdish masses, has been looking for compromises with all powers that be, up to and including the US. Mainstream unions are caught between supporting the "secularist" line of the army and putting up EU imperialism as the road to salvation for the workers of Turkey. As for the once mighty Turkish left, it is politically and ideologically polarised between a left-wing liberal tendency and a so-called nationalist left. The former acts as a channel for the hegemony of the liberal pro-EU bourgeoisie and the latter as a transmission belt for propagating the putschist line of the military. There is certainly a third component, an array of organisations more combative in practice and one that tries to remain independent of the ruling class. These organisations, however, are ideologically and politically too backward to fight the hegemony of the two pro-bourgeois trends on the socialist left. They simply have, so far, not been able to create a pole of resistance that can provide an alternative to the pro-Western secularist current and the Islamist movement so as to wrest the working class away from the hegemony of these bourgeois lines. Moreover, this component of the left has now come under attack from the forces of repression. Some months ago, 16 leading members of a Maoist group were killed during a raid on the congress of the organisation. And last month another organisation, formerly pro-Albanian, and its front groups came under attack and more than twenty-five of its leaders were arrested. These do not seem to be isolated incidents but part of a planned assault on Marxist organisations.

Faced with this difficult situation, Workers' Struggle, Turkish section of the CRFI, has been fighting a three-tier ideological and political battle over the years. Firstly, we do our best to reach out to workers and the youth to explain that the militarist vs. Islamist constellation represents two policies in the name of the ruling classes and that the best interest of the masses can only be served by an alternative force that bases its orientation first and foremost on class politics. Secondly, we tirelessly try to expose ideologically and politically the left-wing liberal and nationalist currents as transmission belts of bourgeois hegemony within the working class and the left. And, thirdly, concerning the imminent crisis facing Turkey and the twin threats of rising putschism and fascism, we have pointed out the impending dangers very early on and have been calling for a workers' united front to fight these twin threats. Concretely speaking, we defend the idea of a political front of all socialist forces that can mobilise more class struggle tendencies within the union movement as it gathers strength. This whole process can, if successful, be crowned with an electoral front in the coming parliamentary elections at the end of 2007, a front that can make the independent voice of the workers be heard as an alternative to the various forces of the bourgeoisie.

The clock is ticking. Even if the crisis that is almost sure to erupt on the occasion of the presidential election were diffused, Turkey would still be sitting on a keg of powder, situated as it is at the crossroads of the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia and torn as it is by the Kurdish question. Only revolutionary working class politics can avoid the catastrophic prospects created by these moving forces.

Artikkeli julkaistaan seuraavassa International Worker-lehdessä nro 7. Lehti on CRFI:n äänenkannattaja. CRFI=Koordinoiva Komitea Neljännen Internationaalin jälleenperustamisesta