EDITORIALS

Chapulling in Turkey
The people have stood up against the Turkish oligarchy.

urkey is in the midst of massive popular unrest in all its major cities and towns. In late May, the impending demolition of Istanbuls Taksim Gezi Park to rebuild the Taksim Military Barracks (demolished in 1940) and construct a shopping mall sparked an environmental protest. The brutal police eviction of the sit-in by environmentalists protesting the Parks demolition caused widespread outrage and precipitated a genuine popular movement that started in Istanbul but soon spread all over the country. That is how it all began. But what is going on and why? The movement is surely not really about the trees alone. Clearly, the protest prompted by the impending demolition of Gezi Park was only the catalyst that set in motion the chapulling (ghting for your rights), a derivative that came to be coined upon the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogans arrogant characterisation on 2 June of the protestors as a few capulcu (looters). The big commercial media outlets have acted as if they are afliates of the governing Justice and Development Party, in Turkish the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP), and so one needs to heed what is being said in social media which has played a major role in keeping people informed. Basically, people all over Turkey are ghting for their democratic rights, voicing their demands in every city square, and this, amidst the tear gas, the water cannons, the rubber bullets, and the brutality of the police. They have overcome the usual apathy and fear, and gained a new self-condence. Masses of people are on the streets after ten years of their rights being taken away bit by bit, as the Turkish critic and screenplay writer Oktay Ege Kozak puts it. All kinds of ags adorn Gezi Park those of the environmentalists, the trade unions, those with pictures of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the hero of the Turkish War of Independence and the countrys rst president, those with the Kurdish emblem alongside pictures of Abdullah Ocalan, even banners with Che Guevara on them. The AKP, in power since 2002, has run roughshod over those who have opposed the big projects that have been part of the construction boom that has spurred economic growth. Widespread anger has been building up over the governments urban development projects, its neo-liberal economic policies, subordination to Washington, and provision of military aid to Syrias opposition ghters who are ghting Washingtons proxy war to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Neo-liberal urban transformation has involved the sale of public spaces, beaches, waters, forests, streams, parks and

urban symbols to private companies, large holdings and investors, as Taksim Solidarity puts it, calling for an end to such illegitimate transfers of public property. Where is all this democratic fervour leading to? There have been calls for the government to resign, indeed, even demands for a new democratic Turkey, which would usher in a new democratic constitution and a civilian-led administration free of the political inuence of the Turkish Armed Forces. Surely such clamours must have rufed the political establishment and Istanbuls haute bourgeoisie. The government has been trying to divide and crush the movement; it has begun classifying and bisecting the movement into legitimate and illegitimate halves, and a merciless crackdown on the latter seems, at the time of writing, on the cards. Dissidents, especially those of the socialist and Kurdish kind, have been subject to torture and homicide, which is one of the countrys open secrets. And, after 9/11, the so-called ght against terrorism has added to the Turkish states arsenal of curbing political dissent. The democratisation of Turkish society has been painfully slow. Still out of bounds is an open debate of its past the intercommunal violence between Turks and Armenians, the forced deportation of the latter from Anatolia in 1915 and the ensuing genocide, the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the treatment of minorities under the Turkish republic, the process of construction of the Turkish national identity, and the large-scale violence, disappearances, deaths and forced migrations in the wake of the conict between the Kurdistan Workers Party and the Turkish Army since the 1980s. This has made the institutionalisation of democracy all the more difcult, what with the failure of channels of communication among the countrys diverse sets of groups. And, to make matters worse, the military still insists on asserting the last word on the Kurdish question, and various voices in the political establishment continue to employ sinister tactics of inciting one community against the other. As it is, the military claims to be the guardian of Kemalism, the ideology of Ataturk, and it is its generals version of the national identity and nationalism that it seeks to impose upon civil society. Against the grain, it might just be the right time to assert that a Turkey beyond nationalism would actually be more conducive to an advancement of its process of democratisation. Nevertheless, the present chapulling is an important episode in the ongoing struggle against Turkeys oligarchy.

Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

june 22, 2013

vol xlviII no 25