Devrim
22nd October 2011, 03:14
I am putting this up mostly because I wanted to link to it, but also it's topical because the Turkish army is in Iraq again following a big PKK attack the other day. It is a few excerpts from e-mails I wrote to a friend during the last war.
Notes from the home front-Turkey at War
Thursday 25th
Yesterday only two nationalist demonstrations came past my house. I suppose that is an improvement…There was an attack on a Kurdish area of Ankara by fascists on Monday. I haven’t seen anything about this in the media. I heard it from somebody who lives there. God knows what is happening in İstanbul… Nationalists demonstrated at ODTÜ, the so-called ‘castle of communism’ on Tuesday. It is the first time their has ever been a nationalist demonstration there. Our organisation has a couple of members there, and they produced a leaflet, which went down very well…The left seems in disarray… the TKP are going on about not letting the imperialists divide our country, a little short of coming all out in favour of the war, but only just…I was accosted on the way to work by a flag seller. He asked me if I had a flag, and when I replied that I didn’t, he demanded to know why not. I told he what to do with his flag…then I realised that it was probably a very dangerous thing to have done…He was one of seven flag sellers I saw while walking to work this morning. 26,000 workers still on strike at Türk Telekom…Novamed also still on strike too…on a personal note yesterday after an argument with a particularly nationalistic shop keeper, I decided that I wasn’t going to shop in places flying the national flag any more. Unfortunately the only shop I have seen since without a national flag was one selling artificial limbs. The need for bread overtook a stupid abstract idea coming from annoyance…
Friday 26th
Last night the Army General Command thanked the public for demonstrating against terrorism…The news is full of these sort of demonstrations. Every city, or small town has them…It is difficult to say how much the army have been directly involved in organising them…Some comrades tell me about discussions with workers on a Telekom picket line. The workers there were condemning the acts of sabotage, which have taken place, and saying that they were patriots, and wouldn’t do anything against the country…Everybody is caught up within it…Leftists still very confused. I speak to the comrades from ODTÜ again. The leftists there are deciding whether to attack the fascists. They have been talking about this for four days now. I am slightly shocked when I learn that there are only actually six fascists there…Anarchists are arguing that we should burn Turkish flags. Are they crazy? The result would be pogrom. There was a flag burning incident a couple of years ago, and the whole country was whipped into hysteria. I can’t imagine what it would cause in Today’s atmosphere…I speak to a girl at work, her voice drops to a whisper when she mentions to me that she is Kurdish. Twenty percent of the country are Kurds, and how many are even afraid to whisper it now…“The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice is to visit Turkey early next month to try to reduce tensions between Ankara and Iraq.” There is a war going on today, and she is coming early next month. Whatever they are saying, is this a signal from the States giving a green light to the generals?…The Chief of the General Staff, General Yaşar Büyükanıt, calls for demonstrators to ‘be restrained’. He says it is the PKK who want to spark ethnic conflict. This makes me feel much more relaxed about the nationalist mobs roaming the streets. It is the PKK who want to spark ethnic conflict not them…I count the number of Flags flying from my apartment block. There are only seven. Why on Earth am I thinking ‘only‘…
Saturday 27th
High court lifts government ban on ‘negative’ media…There is general bourgeoisie media approval of the fact that we don’t have censorship in Turkey…What this means is that you censor yourself. After all if you write anything at all against the national interest you can be tried under the all covering Article 301, insulting ‘Turkishness’…Or end up dead like Hrant Dink, Ahmet Taner Kışlalı, Uğur Mumcu, Ümit Kaftancioğlu, Abdi Ipekçı…I decide not to go to the football tomorrow. At Sivaspor on Monday there were 15,000 people, all with Turkish flags. The Chief of Staff praised them. I think it will be the same everywhere this weekend.. Generally, I don’t stand for the national anthem. I can’t imagine what not doing that would cause tomorrow…Rice warns Turkey against interfering in Iraq…I had an hour discussion with a group of railway workers about the war while I was at work today. Most of them are arguing the standard nationalist line. Some of the things that are said are frightening: “We will clean the Kurds”. One of them argues things that are close to us. It makes me feel a bit more optimistic…I mention it to a comrade later, and it turns out that the rail worker is an anarchist, and the comrade knows him. That is how small the group of people arguing against the war is…Yaşar Büyükanıt Says that a cross boarder operation is not imminent. It sounds like it will start after the 5th of November meeting…
Sunday 28th
Kayseri 300,000, Sivas 30,000, Fethiye 30,000, Antalya 10,000, Çorlu 40,000, Amasya 30,000, Nigde 10,000, Çorum 10,000, Gönen 10,000, Golbasi, 10,000, Şirnak 5,000, Samsun, 1000, Kahramanmaraş, 1,000… Today is Sunday, and I am sitting at home reading the newspaper. These of the numbers of people attending pro-war demonstrations in different cities in Turkey yesterday… Tomorrow is Republic Day, a national holiday, it will be worse. The shop at the bottom of my apartment block has a new flag. It has a large picture of Mustafa Kemal, and the words ‘How happy, I am to be a Turk’ written on it…It reminds me that I am not an ethnic Turk, and that my wife is half Kurdish…
Monday 29th
Today is a public holiday, Republic day, I walk out of the apartment to buy some bread, and a newspaper, into a group of about 500 school children waving flags, and screaming about how the army should take them to be martyrs…The banner on the newspaper shouts out The Greatest holiday, Republic day…I watched some fighting in Istanbul yesterday on the news, the newsreader said it was Kurds throwing petrol bombs at the police…I saw a lot of police panzers, but no molotovs…Stones thrown at a Kurdish coffee shop in Bursa…There is talk of there being a demonstration against the war soon in Ankara…A speak to a friend about it. She tells me she is too afraid to go…20 ‘Terrorists’ were killed in Tunceli yesterday. For those unaware of Turkish geography this is nowhere near the border region. Inside the country, the war goes on…Kurdish shops looted in Bursa…DTP (pro-Kurdish social democratic party) offices burnt down in Ayvalık…Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the PM says “As long as we are firmly bound together, the treacherous separatist terrorist attacks will never attain there goal”…
Friday 2nd
Nothing really seemed to happen this week…the war went on. Turkish helicopters bombarded the PKK positions in the Kandil mountains…people died…there was more sabre rattling…Massoud Barzani warned the PKK…Rice arrived here yesterday, with the one hand promising to find an effective strategy…and the other warning the Turkish State; “We have certainly been concerned that anything that would destabilise the north of Iraq is not going to be in Turkey’s interests, it is not going to be in our interests and it is not going to be in the Iraqis’ interests”…One has to ask whose interests it is in really…Nationalist youths demonstrated against her in Ankara…There were a few small nationalist demonstrations across the country…200,000 in Samsun for example…I spent some time at Telekom on the picket lines this week…The strike is solid, 99% in Ankara, 98% nationally…Morale seems to be good…I got an e-mail from friends in Berlin… “we are very concerned about the situation in Turkey. But also in Germany we are faced with a new wave of nationalism in the Turkish/Kurdish community. Last Sunday there was a violent confrontation between Kurds and Turkish Nationalists in Berlin. The situation was very explosive and dangerous. Especially in my district the Bozkurtlar are very active now.”…Tomorrow there is an anti-war demonstration in Ankara…I have no idea what will happen…
Saturday 3rd
Today was the demonstration…It was bigger than we expected…KESK, and Eğitim-Sen really mobilised their members. I think that there were about 25,000. It is hard to say though…For those who don’t know what a Turkish demonstration is like, it is a lot louder, and more colourful than those in the West…Political groups come in their matching hats, or bibs, and in military formation…There is lots of organised shouting…People stop at seemingly random moments to form a circle, and dance the Halay…Some things of course are the same the world over. There are always some anarchists with funny hair…I didn’t see any Kurdish flags. I only saw one group of Apocular…Lots of the slogans were about US imperialism, and getting it out of the Middle East. I thought we were protesting against Turkey…Only one group of students seem to shout slogans against the nation…All in all a good day. It was good to not feel so isolated… It is nothing though compared to the size of the nationalist demonstrations. This was a national mobilisation. There were people there from all over the country. The nationalists brought out 10,000 in Golbaşi, a small town near Ankara…I didn’t know that 10,000 people even lived in Golbaşi…In other news some group in İzmir is distributing a petition calling for the State to sterilise Kurds…Two armed nationalists in Osmaniye set up a road block early in the week, and threatened to shoot anyone who didn’t shout “Damn the PKK”…Most people didn’t need the encouragement. When they were taken away by the police, crowds were cheering them…Everyday the 5th and war edges a little closer.
Monday 5th
The Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is in Washington meeting with Bush at the moment…The eight Turkish soldiers captured by the PKK have been released…A PKK ceasefire has been declared… There seems to be an attempt to make some sort of deal… There is a lot of war talk on T.V. …
Sunday 11th
Yesterday was the 10th November, and the 68th anniversary of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s death. The whole country officially stops for one minute at the moment that he died, 9.05 a.m. …Ten years ago I would say 100% of people stopped, and stood to attention, in the intervening years it has been decreasing …Last year I was sitting in a café laughing , and joking with fellow workers while my boss (at another table) was the only person who stood…Yesterday, I spoke to people at work who wanted to hit the very few people who didn’t stop…546,620 thousand people were at the ceremony at Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara yesterday…That is a fourfold increase on last years 127,392… So far this year nearly 11,000,000 people have been there…
Yesterday I got out of the city, and went to pick up my wife’s parents…When I arrived there was the Turkish flag in the window…I am not allowed to talk politics with my elderly father-in-law in case it upsets him…Unfortunately this week the usual substitute of football, and Beşiktaş wasn’t guaranteed to have the same effect…The wife corrected the mother-in-law when she called some demonstrators on T.V terrorists…They are just leftist kids, Mum…In case you are wondering there have been no more demonstrations against the war. It was from a series about the 70s…There was a lot of talk about ‘how much we all miss Atatürk’, and how he would have dealt with the terrorists, … I think I mentioned it before, but in case you have forgotten my father-in-law is a Kurd…
It is a bit like my friend F…She talks about how the Arabs are dirty, and not to be trusted…There is nothing strange in this in itself…It is the fact that she is a native Arabic speaker, and has relatives on the Syrian side of the border, which makes it seem just a little incongruous…This is the reality of 84 years of assimilation…
In other news a politician said that he would have rather that the eight Turkish soldiers who were kidnapped had been killed than brought dishonour on the army…The DTP (pro-Kurdish party) has elected a new ‘hard line’ leadership…Newspapers report from their congress that ‘A small Turkish flag was hung in the congress hall, but the Turkish national anthem was not played and no picture of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk…Will their party be closed down?…Two Gendarmerie officers are being charged with complicity in the murder of the journalist Hrant Dink…
The immediate threat of war seems to have diminished. The parliamentary decision though is valid for one year. It is time for some analysis…
Saturday 17th
President Gül announces that Turkey will fight terror to the end…The UN says it understands Turkey’s concerns: “The secretary-general fully understands Turkey’s national security concerns. In that regard, he continues to urge Iraqi authorities to do everything possible to curtail armed groups using Iraqi territory to launch cross-border attacks on Turkey”…Polls say that 81% support cross boarder military operations, up from 46% in July…On Friday, the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals on Friday opened a closure court case against the DTP (Democratic Society Party)…and everyday the Turkish army continues to shell Iraq…This is called peace…
Devrim
Notes from the home front-Turkey at War
Thursday 25th
Yesterday only two nationalist demonstrations came past my house. I suppose that is an improvement…There was an attack on a Kurdish area of Ankara by fascists on Monday. I haven’t seen anything about this in the media. I heard it from somebody who lives there. God knows what is happening in İstanbul… Nationalists demonstrated at ODTÜ, the so-called ‘castle of communism’ on Tuesday. It is the first time their has ever been a nationalist demonstration there. Our organisation has a couple of members there, and they produced a leaflet, which went down very well…The left seems in disarray… the TKP are going on about not letting the imperialists divide our country, a little short of coming all out in favour of the war, but only just…I was accosted on the way to work by a flag seller. He asked me if I had a flag, and when I replied that I didn’t, he demanded to know why not. I told he what to do with his flag…then I realised that it was probably a very dangerous thing to have done…He was one of seven flag sellers I saw while walking to work this morning. 26,000 workers still on strike at Türk Telekom…Novamed also still on strike too…on a personal note yesterday after an argument with a particularly nationalistic shop keeper, I decided that I wasn’t going to shop in places flying the national flag any more. Unfortunately the only shop I have seen since without a national flag was one selling artificial limbs. The need for bread overtook a stupid abstract idea coming from annoyance…
Friday 26th
Last night the Army General Command thanked the public for demonstrating against terrorism…The news is full of these sort of demonstrations. Every city, or small town has them…It is difficult to say how much the army have been directly involved in organising them…Some comrades tell me about discussions with workers on a Telekom picket line. The workers there were condemning the acts of sabotage, which have taken place, and saying that they were patriots, and wouldn’t do anything against the country…Everybody is caught up within it…Leftists still very confused. I speak to the comrades from ODTÜ again. The leftists there are deciding whether to attack the fascists. They have been talking about this for four days now. I am slightly shocked when I learn that there are only actually six fascists there…Anarchists are arguing that we should burn Turkish flags. Are they crazy? The result would be pogrom. There was a flag burning incident a couple of years ago, and the whole country was whipped into hysteria. I can’t imagine what it would cause in Today’s atmosphere…I speak to a girl at work, her voice drops to a whisper when she mentions to me that she is Kurdish. Twenty percent of the country are Kurds, and how many are even afraid to whisper it now…“The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice is to visit Turkey early next month to try to reduce tensions between Ankara and Iraq.” There is a war going on today, and she is coming early next month. Whatever they are saying, is this a signal from the States giving a green light to the generals?…The Chief of the General Staff, General Yaşar Büyükanıt, calls for demonstrators to ‘be restrained’. He says it is the PKK who want to spark ethnic conflict. This makes me feel much more relaxed about the nationalist mobs roaming the streets. It is the PKK who want to spark ethnic conflict not them…I count the number of Flags flying from my apartment block. There are only seven. Why on Earth am I thinking ‘only‘…
Saturday 27th
High court lifts government ban on ‘negative’ media…There is general bourgeoisie media approval of the fact that we don’t have censorship in Turkey…What this means is that you censor yourself. After all if you write anything at all against the national interest you can be tried under the all covering Article 301, insulting ‘Turkishness’…Or end up dead like Hrant Dink, Ahmet Taner Kışlalı, Uğur Mumcu, Ümit Kaftancioğlu, Abdi Ipekçı…I decide not to go to the football tomorrow. At Sivaspor on Monday there were 15,000 people, all with Turkish flags. The Chief of Staff praised them. I think it will be the same everywhere this weekend.. Generally, I don’t stand for the national anthem. I can’t imagine what not doing that would cause tomorrow…Rice warns Turkey against interfering in Iraq…I had an hour discussion with a group of railway workers about the war while I was at work today. Most of them are arguing the standard nationalist line. Some of the things that are said are frightening: “We will clean the Kurds”. One of them argues things that are close to us. It makes me feel a bit more optimistic…I mention it to a comrade later, and it turns out that the rail worker is an anarchist, and the comrade knows him. That is how small the group of people arguing against the war is…Yaşar Büyükanıt Says that a cross boarder operation is not imminent. It sounds like it will start after the 5th of November meeting…
Sunday 28th
Kayseri 300,000, Sivas 30,000, Fethiye 30,000, Antalya 10,000, Çorlu 40,000, Amasya 30,000, Nigde 10,000, Çorum 10,000, Gönen 10,000, Golbasi, 10,000, Şirnak 5,000, Samsun, 1000, Kahramanmaraş, 1,000… Today is Sunday, and I am sitting at home reading the newspaper. These of the numbers of people attending pro-war demonstrations in different cities in Turkey yesterday… Tomorrow is Republic Day, a national holiday, it will be worse. The shop at the bottom of my apartment block has a new flag. It has a large picture of Mustafa Kemal, and the words ‘How happy, I am to be a Turk’ written on it…It reminds me that I am not an ethnic Turk, and that my wife is half Kurdish…
Monday 29th
Today is a public holiday, Republic day, I walk out of the apartment to buy some bread, and a newspaper, into a group of about 500 school children waving flags, and screaming about how the army should take them to be martyrs…The banner on the newspaper shouts out The Greatest holiday, Republic day…I watched some fighting in Istanbul yesterday on the news, the newsreader said it was Kurds throwing petrol bombs at the police…I saw a lot of police panzers, but no molotovs…Stones thrown at a Kurdish coffee shop in Bursa…There is talk of there being a demonstration against the war soon in Ankara…A speak to a friend about it. She tells me she is too afraid to go…20 ‘Terrorists’ were killed in Tunceli yesterday. For those unaware of Turkish geography this is nowhere near the border region. Inside the country, the war goes on…Kurdish shops looted in Bursa…DTP (pro-Kurdish social democratic party) offices burnt down in Ayvalık…Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the PM says “As long as we are firmly bound together, the treacherous separatist terrorist attacks will never attain there goal”…
Friday 2nd
Nothing really seemed to happen this week…the war went on. Turkish helicopters bombarded the PKK positions in the Kandil mountains…people died…there was more sabre rattling…Massoud Barzani warned the PKK…Rice arrived here yesterday, with the one hand promising to find an effective strategy…and the other warning the Turkish State; “We have certainly been concerned that anything that would destabilise the north of Iraq is not going to be in Turkey’s interests, it is not going to be in our interests and it is not going to be in the Iraqis’ interests”…One has to ask whose interests it is in really…Nationalist youths demonstrated against her in Ankara…There were a few small nationalist demonstrations across the country…200,000 in Samsun for example…I spent some time at Telekom on the picket lines this week…The strike is solid, 99% in Ankara, 98% nationally…Morale seems to be good…I got an e-mail from friends in Berlin… “we are very concerned about the situation in Turkey. But also in Germany we are faced with a new wave of nationalism in the Turkish/Kurdish community. Last Sunday there was a violent confrontation between Kurds and Turkish Nationalists in Berlin. The situation was very explosive and dangerous. Especially in my district the Bozkurtlar are very active now.”…Tomorrow there is an anti-war demonstration in Ankara…I have no idea what will happen…
Saturday 3rd
Today was the demonstration…It was bigger than we expected…KESK, and Eğitim-Sen really mobilised their members. I think that there were about 25,000. It is hard to say though…For those who don’t know what a Turkish demonstration is like, it is a lot louder, and more colourful than those in the West…Political groups come in their matching hats, or bibs, and in military formation…There is lots of organised shouting…People stop at seemingly random moments to form a circle, and dance the Halay…Some things of course are the same the world over. There are always some anarchists with funny hair…I didn’t see any Kurdish flags. I only saw one group of Apocular…Lots of the slogans were about US imperialism, and getting it out of the Middle East. I thought we were protesting against Turkey…Only one group of students seem to shout slogans against the nation…All in all a good day. It was good to not feel so isolated… It is nothing though compared to the size of the nationalist demonstrations. This was a national mobilisation. There were people there from all over the country. The nationalists brought out 10,000 in Golbaşi, a small town near Ankara…I didn’t know that 10,000 people even lived in Golbaşi…In other news some group in İzmir is distributing a petition calling for the State to sterilise Kurds…Two armed nationalists in Osmaniye set up a road block early in the week, and threatened to shoot anyone who didn’t shout “Damn the PKK”…Most people didn’t need the encouragement. When they were taken away by the police, crowds were cheering them…Everyday the 5th and war edges a little closer.
Monday 5th
The Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is in Washington meeting with Bush at the moment…The eight Turkish soldiers captured by the PKK have been released…A PKK ceasefire has been declared… There seems to be an attempt to make some sort of deal… There is a lot of war talk on T.V. …
Sunday 11th
Yesterday was the 10th November, and the 68th anniversary of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s death. The whole country officially stops for one minute at the moment that he died, 9.05 a.m. …Ten years ago I would say 100% of people stopped, and stood to attention, in the intervening years it has been decreasing …Last year I was sitting in a café laughing , and joking with fellow workers while my boss (at another table) was the only person who stood…Yesterday, I spoke to people at work who wanted to hit the very few people who didn’t stop…546,620 thousand people were at the ceremony at Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara yesterday…That is a fourfold increase on last years 127,392… So far this year nearly 11,000,000 people have been there…
Yesterday I got out of the city, and went to pick up my wife’s parents…When I arrived there was the Turkish flag in the window…I am not allowed to talk politics with my elderly father-in-law in case it upsets him…Unfortunately this week the usual substitute of football, and Beşiktaş wasn’t guaranteed to have the same effect…The wife corrected the mother-in-law when she called some demonstrators on T.V terrorists…They are just leftist kids, Mum…In case you are wondering there have been no more demonstrations against the war. It was from a series about the 70s…There was a lot of talk about ‘how much we all miss Atatürk’, and how he would have dealt with the terrorists, … I think I mentioned it before, but in case you have forgotten my father-in-law is a Kurd…
It is a bit like my friend F…She talks about how the Arabs are dirty, and not to be trusted…There is nothing strange in this in itself…It is the fact that she is a native Arabic speaker, and has relatives on the Syrian side of the border, which makes it seem just a little incongruous…This is the reality of 84 years of assimilation…
In other news a politician said that he would have rather that the eight Turkish soldiers who were kidnapped had been killed than brought dishonour on the army…The DTP (pro-Kurdish party) has elected a new ‘hard line’ leadership…Newspapers report from their congress that ‘A small Turkish flag was hung in the congress hall, but the Turkish national anthem was not played and no picture of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk…Will their party be closed down?…Two Gendarmerie officers are being charged with complicity in the murder of the journalist Hrant Dink…
The immediate threat of war seems to have diminished. The parliamentary decision though is valid for one year. It is time for some analysis…
Saturday 17th
President Gül announces that Turkey will fight terror to the end…The UN says it understands Turkey’s concerns: “The secretary-general fully understands Turkey’s national security concerns. In that regard, he continues to urge Iraqi authorities to do everything possible to curtail armed groups using Iraqi territory to launch cross-border attacks on Turkey”…Polls say that 81% support cross boarder military operations, up from 46% in July…On Friday, the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals on Friday opened a closure court case against the DTP (Democratic Society Party)…and everyday the Turkish army continues to shell Iraq…This is called peace…
Devrim