Driving through the West Bank on Land Day, March 30, we pull to the side of the road outside Balata refugee camp, on the outskirts of Nablus. In the valley, two bulldozers move slowly against the backdrop of the Nablus hills, plowing a new road through wheatfields. Spring has come early this year, and in the heady sunlight we make our way through the knee-high wheat to ask two burly Israeli soldiers, clearly enjoying their duty of guarding the bulldozers, why the authorities were building a new road parallel to two existing roads.
Mahmut Baksi was born twice. The first time, in Kozluk, a village in Turkish Kurdistan, in 1944. His left-wing and nationalist activities brought him into conflict with his landowning family and with the Turkish authorities. Mahmut chose to leave, and he sought political asylum in Sweden in 1971, where he was born the second time. The metaphor of a second birth comes from the introduction to his book of short stories, Hasan Aga, published in 1979. “I will be eight this year. I came here [to Stockholm] on May 25, 1971. This is my new birthday.
Hardly more than a decade has passed since Egypt’s pioneering emigrants first offered their skills to the nascent development of neighboring Arab countries. Measured against the volume and impact of its labor contributions, this seems a short time indeed. In that time, the limited opportunities once available only to Egypt’s most educated elite have mushroomed to require the talents and energies of tens of thousands of urban craftsmen, public employees and rural unskilled laborers. From these masses of temporary sojourners have come massive transfers of wages and remittances to Egypt’s thirsty economy.
The Arab world comprises 18 states and was inhabited, in 1980, by more than 150 million people. [1] Two factors vital to economic development—population and oil—are, however, distributed in an extremely uneven manner among these states. The abstract possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation between the population-rich and the oil-rich is not being realized. Instead, we are seeing a process of increased inequality and deterioration in the productive and human resources of the Arab world: first, between the oil-rich and population-rich states; and second, between the Arab world as a whole and the industrialized economies from whom the real wealth of the Arab countries (mediated through oil revenues) is coming.
One of the great achievements of the capitalist class in the United States has been its ability to enlist the enthusiastic support of the trade union leadership in this country for a foreign policy of intervention and counterrevolution, a policy clearly against the interests of the organized working class here. One recent instance was AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland’s presence on the panel headed by Henry Kissinger which endorsed the Reagan Administration’s war against Central America. The interest of US corporate leaders in a policy supporting rightwing oligarchies and juntas is directly related to the preservation of low-wage, unorganized labor havens for their “runaway” shops and factories. These in turn are used as levers to wrest concessions from workers in this country.
E. A. Brett, International Money and Capitalist Crisis: The Anatomy of Global Disintegration (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983).
Yaşar Kemal, Anatolian Tales (trans. Thilda Kemal) (London: Writers and Readers, 1983).
As the problems of Third World countries have intensified, modern Third World writers, committed to a realistic literary style, have been playing an important role in providing a more comprehensive view of their societies to readers worldwide. Yaşar Kemal, whose novels and short stories deal primarily with the social relations in Turkish villages, is among these writers. Born in a village in southern Anatolia, Kemal struggled to learn to read and write, and he knows firsthand the conditions under which the characters of his stories live.
On Wednesday, March 14, at 4 pm, an Iraqi Airways Boeing 747 jumbo jet took off from Santiago’s Comodoro Arturo Merino Benitez Airport reportedly loaded with “thousands” of 500-pound cluster bombs. The Iraqis apparently bought the bombs from the Chilean firm Industrias Cardoen SA. Cardoen had been displaying its various military wares at the annual International Air Fair (Feria Internacional del Aire, FIDA-84), which was held March 3-11 at the El Bozque Air Base in the Santiago community of San Bernando.
On February 29, 1984, the Ankara correspondent for United Press International, Ismet Imset, was visited just before midnight by an acquaintance from the Security Forces. The visitor warned him that he and his wife (presumably along with their three-year-old child) were about to be taken into detention for interrogation by a special squad of police from Istanbul.
Deliberate intimidation or friendly warning? It hardly matters. Imset and his wife spent the next three days sheltered in the house of the Reuters correspondent. For them, the incident was the climax to a year of terror ever since Imset complained officially and publicly after police in Istanbul beat him up when he applied for a passport to go abroad on work for UPI.
The awakening of interest in human rights and democracy in Turkey is very welcome and long overdue. It is striking, though, that most accounts of this problem completely omit the question of Cyprus. This is a serious lacunae in the analysis of Turkey, because Cyprus has been the proving ground for the Turkish army and the Turkish right for almost a generation. Cyprus is also the most crucial site of Turkey’s long-running battle with Greece for the Aegean islands. Finally, the thousands of Cypriot victims, both Greek and Turkish-speaking, of the 1974 invasion should form part of the bill of indictment against Turkish military aggrandizement.
In September 1981, on the first anniversary of the military coup, the Economist summarized the succession of events that set Turkey’s critically ailing economy of-the late 1970s on its new course.
The first step was an economic package announced on January 24, 1980. Designed by the government of Süleyman Demirel, it was the brainchild of his finance minister Turgut Özal. The second step was the freeing of interest rates on July 1, 1980. And the third was a series of measures introduced after the military takeover on September 12, 1980. [1]
Between 1960 and 1981, there were three “successful” military takeovers in Turkey, and three other attempts failed. This indicates the important place the army occupies in Turkish political life, but there are differences that set Turkey apart from certain other countries where the army plays a similar role. First and foremost, a civilian parliamentary regime has concurrently existed over a long period of time, during which administrations and oppositions have exchanged places several times via the electoral process. The various coups d’état lasted for short periods, and the so-called parliamentary democratic institutions were revived, to differing degrees, on each occasion.
The elections of November 1983 are unique in the history of modern Turkey. They took place after three years of military rule, during which the entire political structure was completely altered. The alleged aim of this restructuring was to prevent a return to the situation which prevailed before September 12, 1980, the day the Turkish armed forces seized power. The military regime crushed the terrorist movements and closed down all the political parties, and simultaneously produced a new quasi-presidential constitution as well as new political parties and electoral laws. The government disqualified all prominent former politicians from political activity and permitted only new politicians to begin to form new parties on April 25, 1983. The National Security Council (NSC) — led by Gen.
The war between Iran and Iraq has entered its most gruesome phase. Iran has stepped up its “human wave” attacks, sending tens of thousands of new recruits, including many young boys, to face entrenched Iraqi gun positions or to serve as human mine detonators. Tehran, with some evidence, accuses the Iraqi high command of using chemical weapons, including mustard gas, to turn back the Iranian attacks. Iraq’s deputy foreign minister, in Washington in mid-March, weakly responded to these charges by pointing to US use of chemical weapons, such as napalm and Agent Orange, in Indochina, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if to say that Iraq was entitled to some quota of war crimes.
Nikki R. Keddie and Eric Hooglund, eds., The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 1982).
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983).
In the title of his account of four years as Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski offers two concepts that, in his view, should guide US foreign policy. As with so much in this tart apologia, his argument is as often about individuals as about abstractions. “Principle” is a reaction against the realpolitik of the Kissinger era, and its neglect of the human rights issue. “Power” is a riposte to the moralism and “guilt” of Brzezinski’s main rival, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Pro-Arab Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices (New York, 1983).
Dilip Hiro, Inside the Middle East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).
Berch Berberoglu, Turkey in Crisis, From State Capitalism to Neocolonialism (London: Zed Press, 1982).
This is a useful, concise rendition of Turkish political history and economic development. It is rich in facts and easy-to-use economic data. Its best conceptual contribution is the portrayal of the contradictions of the “state capitalist” development path. The analysis is presented chronologically rather than thematically. There is a strong sense of inevitability in this method: of Turkish history marching inexorably toward the pitched “class” battles of the 1970s and the implicitly fascist coup of 1980.
Hüseyin Yildirim is a lawyer and a Kurd from eastern Turkey. In the fall of 1981, he was serving as defense counsel to members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), many of whom had been arrested and subjected to torture by Turkey’s military junta. Yildirim himself was seized in October 1981, and was imprisoned in the Diyarbakir Military Prison from November 1981 until July 1982. He gave the following testimony to Amnesty International on November 3 and 4, 1982, in Sweden, where he now lives. According to Amnesty, a medical examination conducted on November 2, 1982, confirmed that Yildirim “shows signs of external violent injury…[which] may well have occurred as a result of the torture described by [him].”
