Hunger strikers and strikes by the hungry
International Viewpoint #153 • December 12, 1988
TURKEY
Kurdish prisoners, whose parents, especially their mothers, generally speak only Kurdish. Officially, this language does not exist in Turkey, and therefore they are forbidden to use it during visits.
A broad solidarity movement has been organized on the initiative of the prisoners' relatives, the ID, TAYAD and other progressive associations. In Diyarbakir, as a demonstration of solidarity with their chil-
TRANSITION from a military dictatorship to a "normalized"
civilian regime is supposed to be completed in November
1989, when the parliament is to elect a new president to replace General Evren. However, the general has already demonstrated his intention to seek a new term.
Premier Ozal is also a candidate for the presidency, but he has been weakened by a series of difficulties. On the economic front the inflation rate is coming dangerously close to the threshold of 100 per cent. On the political front, he faces internal dissent in his party, the ANAP (Motherland
Party), and the backlash of the defeat suffered in the
September 25 referendum. In the social arena, workers' strugglęs are reviving, and massive strikes are looming in the public sector.
The parliamentary "normalization" has not wiped out the imprint of the 1980 coup d'état. The hunger strike of nearly
2,000 political prisoners that has been going on for more than a month in about 20 prisons reveals the limitations of the liberalization, despite all the democratic cosmetics applied to make it easier for Turkey to join the EEC.
ERDAL TAN
S
YSTEMATIC TORTURE, inhuman living conditions and humiliating treatment had already provoked hunger strikes, in particular in 1983 and 1984, in which several protesting prisoners died.
The struggles in the prisons have been projected outside by solidarity campaigns initiated by organizations such as the Turkish Human Rights League (IHD) and the
Association for Solidarity with the Prisoners' Families (TAYAD), several of whose leaders have recently been arrested.
The prison rebellions broke out in response to the application of the August 1 circular issued by the new justice minister,
Topaç. This set of orders reinstituted the ultra-repressive measures in force during the martial-law period - compulsory wearing of prison uniforms, even for those in preventive detention; increased censorship of books and newspapers and of communication with the outside; a ban on the use of radios, tape recorders and typewriters.
Exercise periods for left political prisoners were arbitrarily reduced. Visits were reduced from one per week to one every two
10 weeks. Collective use of the kitchens was forbidden, and food packages were confiscated. On November 21, the hunger strike was in its 37th day in Diyarbakir prison, and the latest figure given of the numbers involved in the action was 1,839. This included about a hundred prisoners who were in a serous condition and hospitalized but refused treatment. About a dozen of them were on the verge of death.
Prisoners demand basic democratic rights
The prisoners are demanding an end to the compulsory wearing of prison uniforms and to the new restrictions imposed by the August 1 circular, as well as an end to the chaining of inmates together when they are moved (to the court, hospital and so on); an end to beatings and torture; and an end to arbitrary disciplinary penalties, such as the cancelling of time off for good behavior.
They are protesting against vandalism and theft perpetrated by guards during searches. They are demanding the right to talk to their lawyers face to face and the right to speak their native language during visits. This last point is crucial for the dren, 35 mainly elderly parents of prisoners, including 30 women, have been or hunger strike for 23 days in the offices of the People's Social Democratic Party (SHP). Two mothers of prisoners are in a critical state, but have refused treatment in hospital. Similar actions have been organized in several other towns.
On November 11, coming out of a TAYAD meeting in Istanbul, Hanim Sönmez tried to immolate herself. She is the mother of a member of of the Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) sentenced to life in prison, who had been on hunger strike for 25 days. She had had no word of him.
### Military's repressive apparatus still exists
The government has turned a deaf ear to these protests, adopting a Thatcher-style policy. Nonetheless, the struggle in the prisons, the brutality of the repression and the government's cynicism have shown that little has really changed since the establishment of the military dictatorship.
Of course, the situation is not entirely the same. A slow and steady liberalization has widened the room for political activity. But the gains are very precarious and the repressive apparatus set up by the military is still there. For example, four years ago, the chair and general secretary of the Confederation of Progressive Unions of Turkey (DISK), Bastürk and Isiklar, were in prison threatened with the death penalty. Today, they are members of parliament for the SHP. But DISK is still outlawed, and the trade-union laws introduced by the military dictatorship remain in force.
Censorship of the press has been relaxed, and even left and far-left periodicals can be published legally. But in four years of civilian government, from 1984 to 1988, 2,127 journalists have been prosecuted, and 1,426 cases of "press offences" have been brought to trial.
In January, Turkey signed the European Convention on Torture. But that has not reduced the number of people tortured. A case in point is that of the editor of the magazine Yeni Çözüm, who was tortured for four days so savagely in the Ankara prefecture of police that he tried to kill himself.
Martial law has been lifted, but it has been replaced in the provinces of Kurdistan by a "state of emergency," and in the rest of the country by a beefing up of the police forces, whose numbers have increased by 50% within a few years.
The police, moreover, do not hesitate to
carry out summary executions. In October, near Istanbul the cops riddled a car carrying four suspected members of a far left group, although the latter were clearly unarmed. They fired 283 bullets into the
Despite the lifting of martial law, the mass trials of left organizations are continuing before military tribunals. At the trial of Dev Yol (Revolutionary Road) members now underway in the Ankara military tribunal, 74 of the 723 defendants are in danger of being sentenced to death. In the Istanbul military tribunal, after seven years of "preventive detention" (!), the 1,243 defendants in the Dev Yol (Revolutionary Left) trial, were able in October to begin to present their defense. Some 180 of them face the possibility of death sentences.
There have been some "steps forward" on the Kurdish question. It is no longer an absolute taboo, even in the parliament and the bourgeois press. Ozal included on his slate a former Kurdish deputy who under martial law was imprisoned and tortured for "Kurdish separatism." The person concerned was elected. But in Kurdistan, hundreds of people suspected of having links with the PKK have been arrested and tortured. And the police have been given orders to "shoot-to-kill" presumed members
The Turkish government's attitude toward the Kurdish refugees who fled Iraq and chemical weapons massacres is another example of the Ozal regime's hypocrisy and cynicism. At first, Ozal refused to let them cross the border, but he was obliged to yield under the "physical" pressure of the 100,000 refugees massed along the frontier. However, he managed to portray this as evidence of his government's humanitanan and democratic character! With a great fanfare, temporary housing supplies and infrastructural equipment were sent in order to foster this image, and, of course, to try to win the votes of Turkish Kurds for the September 25 referendum.
In reality, the Kurdish refugees were into veritable concentration camps, where they were searched and registered, "in order to prevent any infiltration by PKK members." The government applied all sorts of direct and indirect pressures to force them to return to Iraq or go to Iran, which did not want to accept them
Cover-up of Iraq's Kurdish massacre
Food supplies were largely deficient both in quantity and quality. The journal Kurdistan Press, which is published in Western Europe, reports that the government did not transmit the international aid for the refugees, that it prevented Kurdish personalities in Diyarbakir from giving the refugees material help and that it has done everything possible to conceal the evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Iraq, its ally in repressing the Kurds.
"They have committed a crime against the state. They have rebelled....If it had not been for the West, we would have shown what you get for that here. No, no-one has been tortured, thanks to the West of course." These words of the prefect of Hakkari, a small Kurdish town on the Iragi frontier illustrate the Turkish government's real policy toward the Kurdish refugees.
TURKEY [Vers 2000, October 16, 1988.]
President Evren's official trip to Germany in October put the European seal of "respectability" on him. The statement that he made during this trip, "One day Turkey should also have a legal Communist Party," was hailed by a part of the Turkish and international press as evidence of a liberalization. Nonetheless, this was not the first time that the general raised such a possibility for a vague and distant future.
Moreover, even if you leave aside the fact that the two main leaders of the United Communist Party of Turkey (TBKP) are still behind bars charged with "Communist propaganda" and that the Socialist Party, successor of the Workers' and Peasants' Party of Turkey (TIKP) outlawed by the military, was banned almost as soon as it was founded, it is still hard not to wonder about the general's real intentions when you read the end of his statement:
"Because while there is no Communist Party, you can't know who is and who is not a Communist, and they infiltrate other parties. In any case, the formation of such a party can only occur if the people want it, and this question should certainly be submitted to a referendum."
In fact, it is clear in the present situation that a referendum on the question of legalizing the CP would result in a conservative landslide of "no's." In a period of depoliticization, of retreat for the mass organizations, and especially when democratic freedoms are extremely limited and channels of information blocked, such a referendum could become a plebiscite of a fascistic type.
Referendums used as
"AAH! THE TURKEY OF MY DREAMS! NO STRIKES, NO OPPOSITION AND NO NOISE!"
La diversion
The government systematically resorts to referendums as a weapon to divert the attention of the people from the real problems, to conceal the fundamental issues and deepen depoliticization. A typical example was the September 25 referendum that Ozal
OH VAHU!
NE GREV VAR
NE MUHALEFET
ÇIT YOK ÇIT! İŞTE
İDEALiMDEKİ
TÜRKİYE.
staged in order to bring forward by four months the municipal elections scheduled for March 1989.
The premier was in a hurry to apply new austerity measures that would have lost him votes if they had been put into practice on the eve of the municipal elections. The opposition, for its part, tried to turn this referendum into a vote of no confidence in the government. The campaign was thus chaotic and no one knew what they were voting
The "no's" won by more than 65 per cent. But the formal victors found themselves incapable of translating this into political gains. Far from being weakened, Ozal managed to recoup his bet. He even declared himself the victor. If the "no's" were a rejection of his government, then the "yes's" meant approval, and they brought him to within 1 per cent of what he won in the No- 11 vember 1987 legislative elections, which, nber 12, 1988 • #153 International Viewpoint
International Viewpoint #153 • December 12, 1988
TURKEY thanks to the subtleties of the electoral system, give him two thirds of the seats.!
ANAP seems to have managed to stabilize an urban electoral base, especially among the lumpen proletariat in the shantytowns and among the urban pettybourgeoisie. It is not a cadre party but rather a combination coalesced around the personality of the premier and based on patronage and the advantages of holding governmental power.
The party's activist base is mainly in the hands of the "holy alliance" that includes former members of the Islamic party and of the fascist groups. At the ANAP congress in June 1988, several supporters of the holy alliance were elected in place of "liberals" who had Ozal's support. But despite their victory, they were excluded from certain key posts in the party and the government. The premier wanted in fact to maintain his party"s "liberal and modernist" showcase.
On the eve of the referendum, Ozal did threaten to withdraw from politics if he were dealt a "significant" defeat. But this was mainly to bring to heel the supporters of the holy alliance who were discreetly sabotaging the campaign in order to express their discontent. Even if this threat was enough to restore order during the ter year also, the country's two main holding companies, Koç and Sabanci, increased their profits respectively by 160% and
The grumbling today in business circles is due to the inflation rate, which may reach 90% by the end of the year. The real difficulty comes from the foreign debt burden, which rose from $16 billion in 1980 to more than $38 billion in 1987. The service on the debt amounted to $7.8 billion in 1988. The economy's growth rate, 8% in
TUUU! SANIGI PRIZDE UNUTTUM!..
26% and 35% in inflation. In 1987, it was 35% and 67%.
The minimum net wage was increased by 60% in June, and is about 126,000 Turkish lira, or $60, a month. Moreover, the official inflation rate is a poor reflection of the real situation. While the inflation rate now stands at 78%, basic food prices have increased by far more than that - 104% for bread (the staff of life), 145% for rice, 131% for cooking oil and 96% for
Pushed into a corner by the deterioration in their living conditions and buying power, the workers are beginning to express their discontent. Despite all the restrictions and fetters on the right to strike, the number of hours lost due to strikes reached 2 million in 1987, and has exceeded 1 million in the first nine months of 1988. This total is far higher than in 1979 and 1980 (1.1 million and 1.3 million respectively). The bosses, who complained of social chaos at that time, are a lot calmer today. The reason may be that the days lost have been partially in long strikes in small enterprises, without major economic repercussions. However, things may change quite rapidly. The recent conflict involving the SEKA state paper mills offers a
"DAMN! | FORGOT TO UNPLUG THE PRISONER" campaign, the frictions inside the
Corruption and careerism
These clashes have more to do with struggles for influence aimed at gaining access to government posts for the sake of patronage and personal enrichment than they do with ideological differences, which are real but relative. The corruption of the ministers and their hangers-on is notorious, and often ANAP deputies themselves expose their own ministers. This has happened notably in the case of the financial scandals around bonuses and tax reductions for fictitious exports.
The attempt by a former fascist activist to assassinate Ozal during the ANAP congress in June may have been linked to this sort of business. Many former fascist activists have in fact been recycled into the mafia, with which they already collaborated closely in the arms and drugs traffic before the coup d'état.
The crisis in the right is also the reflection of the discontent of some sections of the bourgeoisie. But despite his difficulties, Ozal still has the support of the big bourgeoisie, which has every reason to be satisfied with him. According to the annual study of the Istanbul Chamber of Conference, which took in the 500 biggest companies in Turkey, the share of profits in turnover rose from 23.7% in 1986 to 27% 12 in 1987, while that of wages dropped from i 37.9% in 1986 to 34.7% in 1987. In the lat-
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) want to impose a new austerity program, with cuts in appropriations for infrastructural investment and for social services. They do not want wages in the public sector to rise, and are demanding an end to subsidies for agriculture.
It is on these points that Ozal faces social problems. Falling incomes in agriculture are impelling rural voters to support the Just Voice Party (DYP) led by former premier Demirel, Ozal's great rival, and a candidate to succeed him if the ANAP falls
In the cities, moreover, Ozal faces reviving activity by the working class, which has seen its wages drop by 50% in ten years, even according to the official figures. From 1976 to 1986, the share of wages in the national income has dropped from 33.6% to 18.6% (per capita GNP is
According to a study by the union Petrol-Is, taking the year 1963 as a 100, average wages increased slightly for 15 years -107.6 in 1976 and 109.9 in 1977 — and then dropped sharply over the last decade, reaching 45.1 in 1987! In the public sector, wages dropped by 32.7% over the last 2 years and by 25% in 1988.
Over the last four years, wage increases have remained below the rate of inflation. In 1984, wages went up by 29%, and the official inflation figure by 43%. In 1985, wages went up by 26% and inflation by 47%. In 1986, the increase in wages was good illustration of the workers' mood. For more than half a century, there had never been any serious labor conflict in these factories. But since September 10,000 workers there have been on strike.
Despite a draft agreement between the union Sellüloz-Is and the bosses, the workers organized special general assemblies and forced the union to break off the negotiations. The government, for its part, did everything to delay and head-off the strike. In order to break it, three days before it was scheduled to begin, the government decided to import newsprint freed from all taxes, thereby giving the big press barons a hand-
Restrictions on the right to strike
Since then, the government has refused to yield, and has let the conflict drag on. After 70 strike days, the economic losses are estimated at 173 billion lira, while it would have cost only 94 billion to meet the workers' wage demands.
In order to get around the many restrictions on the right to strike, the workers have resorted to passive-resistance methods. Denied the right to strike, since this is forbidden in the oil industry, the 3,500 workers at the Aliaga refinery, which is linked to the Petkim petrochemicals complex, decided to boycott meals, work barefoot, take their work overalls home and, as a last resort, go 1. For the legislative election results, see IV 133,
refugees are now in Western Europe, and 14,000 of those have reportedly been deprived of their Turkish citizenship. *
December 12, 1988 • #153 International Viewpoint on hunger strike. As a token of solidarity, in response to a call by Petrol-Is at the beginning of November, 80,000 workers in various enterprises boycotted meals in the canteens.
In the auto industry, the workers decided not to shave their beards. At the Gölcük shipyard, 4,500 workers blocked highway traffic. In the Zonguldak coalfield, 45,000 miners opposed their unions, which wanted to sign a contract, and are now preparing to go on strike. At present, 55,000 workers in various enterprises have already given strike notice.
Contracts will run out at the beginning of 1989 for 640,000 wage earners, the great majority of whom are in the public sector. And the government is determined not to give an inch on wages. So, we can expect a wave of mass strikes starting in FebruaryMarch next year.
Even if some ingredients for a social explosion have been assembled, hasty and over-optimistic conclusions cannot be drawn from this revival of activity in the plants. These are above all strictly economic strikes, and are not automatically accompanied by an increase in consciousness sufficient to break down the limitations imposed by depoliticization.
Trade-union law limits possibilities for action
In fact, along with their standard of living, the workers' levels of consciousness and organization have also sunk sharply over recent years under the weight of demoralization and the defeats suffered in the period before and after the coup d'état. The eight years of bourgeois stability and the depoliticization policy pursued by the civilian and military governments have left deep scars, especially since no credible left alternative has taken shape either in the trade-union or political arena.
real solution for the crisis in the union movement.
### SHP leaders refuse support for hunger strikers
The SHP, bogged down in factional struggles, is not even capable of waging a consistent democratic struggle. On the anniversary of the coup d'état, when some SHP deputies strongly criticized Evren and demanded that he be tried for his crimes, the party's president, Inönü, came to the general's defence on the grounds that it was necessary to respect the head of state. He has also disavowed his party's Kurdish deputies.
The SHP leadership has likewise refused to support the recent hunger strikes, and Inönü has made appeals for them to be ended. Confronted with the active support of some of the SHP deputies and federal secretaries for the hunger strikers, especially in Diyarbakir, Inönü and his general secretary, Baykal, have ordered the party to take its distance from the strikes and "not to involve the party and its headquarters in this
On the economic front, the Inönü-Baykal duo is offering to manage the crisis better than Ozal. They have been holding more and more meetings with businessmen to reassure them of their intentions.
The SHP left wing divided recently, and although it has offered active support to some democratic struggles (the hunger strikes, the May 1 demonstration, struggles against state terror and repression) it is not in a position to offer an overall alternative to Ozal. It confines itself to the role of an impotent opposition, trapped within the SHP, its bureaucratic structures and its statist-populist ideology.
TURKEY
The revolutionary left, for its part, is still in crisis. And for the moment it is far from being a pole of attraction. Today there is a general crisis of confidence. Nobody believes in the government's promises anymore. The workers no longer have any confidence in their unions either, and feel a need to keep a close eye on them to prevent them from signing contracts behind their backs.
The Türk-Is leadership is totally discredited. Photos and caricatures of its chair, Sevket Yilmaz, arm-in-arm with Halit Narin, the top dog in the employers' confederation, are multiplying in all the newspapers, symbolizing this leadership's incompetence and corruption.
Workers slowly regaining combativity
Eight years after the coup d'état, the workers are slowly regaining their combativity and finding their way back into struggles. But they still do not have a clear perspective for rising above the present level of consciousness and organization.
The prison revolt and the solidarity movement that has developed around this struggle also show that it would be wrong to think that the years of repression have managed to wipe out all the gains and potential of the left in Turkey. But it will be, necessary to go through a long and laborious process of recomposition before any solution begins to emerge to the crisis of confidence. * 2. Türk-Is was built in the 1950s with the help of the US trade-unions. It constantly played a braking role in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. After the 1980 coup d'état, its general secretary was minister of labor in the first military government.
Eight years of repression
Trade-union membership represents no more than 11% of the workforce. The conservative confederation Türk-Is, which be- ACCORDING to research by the Turkish Human Rights Association (HD) came totally dominant after the outlawing for the eighth anniversary of the September 1980 coup d'état, 700,000 of DISK, includes 83% of the the country's people have been detained for political reasons. In addition, 210,000 trials 2 million union members. Of course, the have been initiated by civilian and military prosecutors, of which 202,000 militant DISK trade unionists are active in the ranks of Türk-Is, which they have been Amnesty International's report talks about 250,000 arrests. Fifty people forced to join. But the peculiar way of func- sentenced to death have been executed, and a further 220 death sentenctioning of this "state union," which is very es are awaiting ratification by the National Assembly. A hundred people closely tied to the state apparatus and the condemned to death are waiting for the military appeals court to confirm bosses, severely restricts their maneuvering their sentences. More than a thousand people have died in "clashes with the forces of order", and at least 177 have died under torture.
Some independent unions have occasion- According to the official figures, there are more than 50,000 people in cially adopted a more militant stance, but vilian prisons, of whom more than 20,000 are in preventive detention. they are still too weak, and are struggling to Moreover, despite the lifting of martial law, 1,400 are still being held in the survive. The trade-union law, moreover, military prisons. The overwhelming majority of the political prisoners belimits their possibilities for action, because long to various left and far left groups and to the Kurdish nationalist in order to sign a contract in an enterprise, a union has to include more than 10% of the According to the IHD report, about 30,000 Turkish and Kurdish political workers in the industry.
The "left wing" of Türk-Is, for its part, is integrated into the apparatus of the SHP. And while it has a profile of demanding more for the workers, it is not able to offer a have been carried through.
organizations.
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(Bulletin Info-Türk, October 1988) 13
After three
International Viewpoint #153 • December 12, 1988
IRELAND
U NABLE to resolve the national
question, the British and the Dublin government agreed to a form of words that pushed it to one side. The British indicated that they would not oppose Irish unity in the unlikely event that their loyalist supporters in the occupied northern counties would agree to it. For their part the Dublin government, rulers of the formally independent 26 Counties, went as far as they could towards recognizing the occupation by linking Irish unity to a loyalist veto. The result, as Britain's Northern Ireland secretary Tom King said afterwards, was to guarantee partition.
In this framework the British offered "equality of two traditions". The Nationalist minority in the occupied 6 Counties, while continuing to be denied their national rights, were to be offered equality with the pro-British unionist population in employment, and social, cultural and judicial
The agreement also aimed to restabilize partition by re-establishing a local parliament in the occupied North. (The former parliament, Stormont, ruling on the basis of protestant ascendancy and military repression, had been swept away in the mass nationalist revolt that began with the civil rights struggle in 1968 — see IV 150). Significantly, this proposal made no offer of power for nationalists within a unionist administration, which was the basis of an earlier British strategy, the Sunningdale agreement of 1973.
The accord also attempted to press ahead with the economic and political restructuring of the whole island, begun in the 1960s and explosively interrupted by the mass upsurge of nationalist resistance. Border would not obstruct capitalists' profits
At that time traditional industries like textiles and engineering, on which unionist power was based, were on the decline, and Dublin politicians were accepting that their attempt to build an independent capitalism had failed. Both parts of Ireland were moving towards a strategy of attracting multinational investment. Imperialist strategy aimed at a rationalized Irish infrastructure. The border between North and South would remain as a barrier to workers' unity, but would not obstruct capitalist profits.