Turkey
The Torture of Huseyin Yildirim
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].”
The Kurds in Turkey
Traveling from western Turkey to its eastern provinces is like going to an entirely different country—more primitive, poorer, with starker social contradictions. Many peasants there still live in semi-feudal bondage, tribal loyalties are strong, and traditional concepts of honor find expression in violent conflicts. Many people there speak Kurdish rather than Turkish. According to many Turkish politicians or academics, this linguistic peculiarity is yet another indication of the area’s backwardness. In the official Turkish view, the Kurds are of Turkish origin, but they have culturally and linguistically degenerated and now speak a gibberish comprised of Persian, Arabic and Turkish and incapable of expressing sophisticated thought.
“Please Don’t Use My Name”
This interview was conducted by Karen Pfeifer in Ankara during November 1983.
How would you like to be identified?
I have been in prison five times since the 1980 coup, so please don’t use my name. I was an activist in the construction workers’ union, a shop steward in one of the most progressive unions in the Türk-Iş federation. I started as an unskilled worker, making pavement. I worked for two years in a private company, then for 25 years in the state highway department.
What was your work day like?
“The Traditional Middle in Turkish Politics Disintegrated”
Ahmet (a pseudonym) was a founder of the Turkish People’s Liberation Front Party in 1971. He was imprisoned from 1972 to 1974, and released during the general amnesty. He worked with Türk-Iş (the state-endorsed trade union confederation) in the 1970s and helped publish the political journal Birikim. In 1979, he was invited by Abdullah Baştürk to transfer to work with DISK, the progressive confederation of trade unions. Ahmet resigned from DISK in April 1980.
“The Workers as a Class Were Defeated”
Metin Kara (a pseudonym) worked on the staff of DISK, the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions. He now lives in exile in Brussels, and he works with the DISK liaison bureau there. His trade union work dates back to 1967, when he was a member of a DISK-affiliated union. From 1975 to 1978, he worked as a staff member in the publication and education bureaus of several DISK member unions. He was interviewed in late 1983 by Sami Kum, a Turkish citizen who now lives in the US and works with the Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Turkey.
How do you see the political history of the workers’ movement in Turkey after World War II?
Trade Unions and Turkey’s Working Class
The emergence of the working class as a force on Turkey’s political scene is essentially a phenomenon of the years since World War II. The organized expression of this class, trade unions, also made their appearance in these years. Both these developments were closely related to the process of rapid industrialization in postwar Turkey. In the 1940s, industry and construction accounted for about 20 percent, and manufacturing for just over 10 percent, of national output. As of 1950, these shares began to rise, accompanied by falling ratios for the agricultural sector. By 1970, manufacturing accounted for a fifth of GNP, and by 1978 this sector was responsible for a greater share of GNP than agriculture.
Western Silence on Turkey
About July 20, 1983, a BBC television news crew filming outside Istanbul’s Metris prison found itself confronted by difficulties which, one of the crew said, he had never experienced even in the Soviet Union. During a subsequent flurry of messages between the crew, the British Embassy in Ankara, and the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the crew learned that they were supposed to work with a Turkish plainclothes policeman permanently at their side (or if they wished, following at a distance). The Foreign Ministry also indicated that the crew might have had an easier time had they not chosen to be accompanied by the present writer, the Ankara stringer for the BBC as well as for other newspapers and broadcasting organizations. The message was duly relayed to the crew.
From the Editors (January/February 1984)
It has become quite the rage in Washington lately to declaim “state terrorism” as the new scourge of humanity. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post recently featured extensive inquiries into the attacks against US and Israeli targets in Lebanon, and US and Kuwaiti targets in the Gulf. Before the ink was dry, the chorus of Reagan, Shultz and Weinberger were denouncing “state terrorism” from every pulpit and grandstand as the major affliction of civilization in this decade. Never mind that acts of armed resistance against military occupation—such as in Lebanon—are now routinely labeled “terrorist” by the learned men who edit the Times and the Post.
Discrete Forms of the Petty Bourgeoisie
Çağlar Keyder, The Definition of a Peripheral Economy: Turkey, 1923-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980.
“The Political Power of the Turkish Bourgeoisie Has Been Increasing with Every Decade”
Feroz Ahmad, author of The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, visited Turkey for a month in the summer of 1979, after an absence of two years. On November 12, 1979, MERIP editors Philip Khoury and Joe Stork spoke with him at his home in Boston about recent political developments in Turkey.
One feature said to characterize Turkish politics over the last few years is the rise of a “proto-fascist” movement.
Turkish Politics and Class Struggle, 1950-1975
Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 1950-1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).
