Begin­ning a new arti­cle on Turkey means return­ing to these past few years dur­ing which wars, crimes against human­i­ty, geostrate­gic games, and Occi­den­tal duplic­i­ties have built up an impos­si­ble sit­u­a­tion in the Mid­dle East.

It means con­stant­ly bear­ing in mind this sit­u­a­tion has wound­ed so many in their flesh, at home and else­where, and forced sev­er­al mil­lions into exile, some of whom encoun­tered death on the way.

It also means hav­ing to tear apart the veil of false moder­ni­ty that leads tourits vis­it­ing Istan­bul to say “every­thing is fine.”

We might agree, if by this one means the Bospho­rus has­n’t moved and that the view is still  post­card-per­fect – as long as you avoid the build­ings being put up “for 2023”.

But as we keep encoun­ter­ing in Europe press arti­cles, books and even meet­ings and con­fer­ence about Turkey, inform­ing us the coun­try is “on the way to…”, some day, the ques­tion will have to be raised: “on the way to what?”

My mod­est inten­tion with this arti­cle is to broach, in the usu­al unpre­ten­tioius and dis­or­der­ly fash­ion, a reflec­tion on a top­ic greater experts than I have been study­ing for some 40 years.

Mouthing the word “democ­ra­cy”, some con­sid­er it a kind of imper­iled species on the road to extinc­tion in Turkey. A sort of imper­iled masterpiece…

For me, a leop­ard is a leop­ard, a polar bear is a polar bear, a dodo was a dodo, a bee is a bee, but in Turkey, democ­ra­cy is an unknown species. 

First, let’s set the scene once again

The Turk­ish Repub­lic isn’t quite one hun­dred years old. Even mov­ing back only 40 years, one already encoun­ters a few mas­sacres of pop­u­la­tions, often the same ones. No need to move back much fur­ther, for we might then find on the Repub­lic’s bap­tismal font, not only mas­sacres but a true geno­cide.   One of those which, at the cost of polit­i­cal maneu­ver­ing to seal elec­toral alliances, lit­tle by lit­tle, left and right-wing par­ties “rec­og­nize”… And if you talk a bit with Turk­ish Kurds, they will also describe “the nineties” as years of tor­ture, crimes and exac­tions, of jail­ings, exiles. Let’s not even men­tion “the eighties”…

So what exact­ly was this “democ­ra­cy” so deeply regret­ted by those who claim “things were so much bet­ter before”?

Of what is the AKP regime a fruit, a continuation, a prolongation, a rupture?

Per­haps these ques­tions seem mun­dane. We could set­tle for say­ing “things are lousy in Turkey”… “Well, I was there this sum­mer, and I was told things weren’t so bad…Personally, I did­n’t see a thing.” I spare you the name of the hotel and a descrip­tion of the gulls above the Bosphorus.

A mem­o­ry streams by in my head from my lycée days in the six­ties. The “Alger­ian con­flict” was head­ing for Evian, the streets were fes­tooned with tags by the OAS, news­pa­pers fea­tured black and white pho­tos of a ripped apart 4CV Renault and the por­trait of a lit­tle girl killed in a ter­ror­ist attack.   Elvis was on the TV screen in the young work­ers’ home where I ate at noon. There had been a ter­ri­ble acci­dent at the 24h Mans sports car race…

A sol­dier on leave, a young­ster from the neigh­bor­hood who was serv­ing as a para­medic in Algiers, repeat­ed to any­one who would lis­ten in what con­di­tion “they put the dirty arabs…” end of quote. In those days, France was “on its way to what”? It was the end of one Repub­lic about to give birth to anoth­er, under threat, while the “colonies were imper­iled”. And yet, it was­n’t for lack of “demo­c­ra­t­ic” insti­tu­tions, exac­er­bat­ed par­lia­men­tarism, of Left­ism, whether in the oppo­si­tion or not, nor of active filibustering.

The French, on the way to their hol­i­days, and the mon­ster traf­fic jams also delight­ed the news­cast­ers. My ado­les­cent eyes saw noth­ing but the seagulls…

Does this mean France was liv­ing under fas­cism, that it was a dic­ta­tor­ship? The bod­ies of the Alge­ri­ans float­ing in the Seine in 1961, the beat­ings in the provinces and the slums…were those fas­cism? And Mau­rice Papon, the ex-col­lab­o­ra­tor recy­cled into chief of police for a mur­der­ous Repub­lic, was he a demo­c­rat in an imper­iled democ­ra­cy “on the way to something”?

A few years lat­er, in 1968, this “demo­c­ra­t­ic and repub­li­can regime” was shak­en by a wave of protest from a youth torn between a desire for lib­er­al­ism and moder­ni­ty, and a refusal of the exist­ing order exud­ing the repres­sive and nor­ma­tive fea­tures of the Nation-State.   That wave, of a transna­tion­al mag­ni­tude, would give birth to neo-lib­er­al­ism ten years lat­er, and dri­ve the careers of reformist politi­cians born in the pre­ced­ing peri­od, while the lie fell apart in the East, giv­ing the beau­ti­ful word of “com­mune” a taste of slaugh­ter­house blood for decades.

Cap­i­tal­ist glob­al­iza­tion had its work cut out, and took on the fea­tures of nation­al crises…

So let’s get back to Turkey.

Could it be that we disagree on the meaning of the word “democracy”?

A Pres­i­dent orders a new vote because the pop­u­la­tions of Turkey have not giv­en him the expect­ed absolute major­i­ty, while he stokes wars, out­side his bor­ders in Syr­ia, inside his bor­ders in the East — is this democ­ra­cy? He obtains a YES for a change to the con­sti­tu­tion that prof­its him and his oli­garchy, out of fear and repres­sion. Is this democ­ra­cy? Lest we for­get, the polit­i­cal ascent of this same man rests on insti­tu­tion­al repub­li­can votes and polit­i­cal coups that were a spe­cial­ty of the Kemal­ist regimes he opposed up until the heav­en-blessed one in 2016…

So, what has changed?

I set aside the region­al con­text which, of course, overde­ter­mines everything.

The dis­missals by decree, the purges, the arrests and impris­on­ments now affect much more than the Kur­dish pop­u­la­tion which tra­di­tion­al­l­ly served as the main scape­goat dur­ing the past thir­ty years. Which does not mean that oth­ers, con­sid­ered as “minori­ties”, were spared. The qua­si upris­ing of the young peo­ple, and  of old­er ones, in 2013, which offi­cial­ly caused 6 deaths and 7800 wound­ed around Gezi Park, indeed changed some­thing: the feel­ing that State repres­sion could extend to protests in the West and in large Turk­ish towns.   And this protest had par­tial­ly bypassed the tra­di­tion­al Kemal­ist par­ties, the usu­al fus­es and buffers. Thus, the repub­li­cans saw their own insti­tu­tions lift­ing the trun­cheons and rain­ing down State vio­lence against them.

This is the moment to attempt a com­par­i­son with the sev­en­ties, when social con­flicts and class war­fare were on the rise and cre­at­ed a left and a rad­i­cal ultra-left on the one hand, and fed a fresh spurt of ultra nation­al­ism on the oth­er. Fol­low­ing the 1960, then the 1971 coups d’E­tat, the army regained pow­er in 1980 against those one of our gen­er­als would have described as “the rab­ble”. Eleven suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments occu­pied the scene dur­ing that peri­od, includ­ing that of the then- social demo­c­ra­t­ic CHP. This is when the Turk­ish ultra-left, fol­low­ing the 1980 coup d’é­tat, was sub­ject­ed to incar­cer­a­tions and vio­lence, soon fol­lowed by the Kur­dish pop­u­la­tions in vil­lages and small towns who had tak­en the Turk­ish left at its word and cre­at­ed the Kur­dis­tan Work­ers’ Par­ty (PKK 1978). Exac­tions in the East marked the eight­ies with razed vil­lages, exiles and the recon­fig­u­ra­tion of towns with a Kur­dish majority.

With all this, I still have not answered my own ques­tion, besides the fact that State-wise, from one to the oth­er, repres­sions and reac­tions are part­ly iden­ti­cal. Still, Gezi did not equal the cri­sis of the sev­en­ties, yet the repres­sion was not less strong nor less mur­der­ous for all that. Fas­cism? Dic­ta­tor­ships? Total absence of “democ­ra­cy”, that much is cer­tain, oth­er than par­lia­men­tary and rep­re­sen­ta­tive, in the frame­work of a Nation-State hid­ing its crises behind parox­ysms of vio­lence against its opponents.

For dic­ta­tor­ship, we find the def­i­n­i­tion: Polit­i­cal regime in which pow­er is held by a sin­gle per­son or by a group of per­sons who exer­cise it with­out con­trol, in an author­i­tar­i­an man­ner; time dur­ing which a dic­ta­tor holds power.” 

For fas­cism : “Fascism is an author­i­tar­i­an polit­i­cal sys­tem com­bin­ing pop­ulism, nation­al­ism and total­i­tar­i­an­ism in the name of a supreme col­lec­tive ide­al. A rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment, it is in frontal oppo­si­tion to par­lia­men­tary democ­ra­cy and to the Lib­er­al State that guraran­tees indi­vid­ual rights.”

Odd­ly enough, might these def­i­n­i­tions match both kemal­ism and the AKP regime?

Thus, we can legit­i­mate­ly say that in Turkey, we are “on the way” to denounc­ing a lie: that of the exis­tence of a democ­ra­cy at any phase what­so­ev­er of the exis­tence of its Repub­lic, and which is basi­cal­ly the nation­al lie of every Nation-State.

Repub­li­can nation­al­ist friends on the left and on the right, let us meditate!


Illus­tra­tion : Kyr­sos Pho­tog­ra­phy | Flickr

Trans­la­tion by Renée Lucie Bourges
iknowiknowiknowblog.wordpress.com

Français : La Turquie est tou­jours en voie de quelque chose… Cliquez pour lire

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Let­tres mod­ernes à l’Université de Tours. Gros mots poli­tiques… Coups d’oeil politiques…