Breaking into Taksim Square: May Day 2007 in Istanbul
7 May 2007. A World to Win News Service. This year’s May Day in Turkey saw bitter clashes with police in many cities around the country. But the sharpest was in Istanbul, in Taksim Square, the heart of Turkey’s largest city.
Thirty years ago, on May Day 1977, a demonstration of 1.5 million people, out of the total population at that time of 4 million, took to the streets and converged on the square. The country had been going through a period of revolutionary upheaval, and the generals holding the real power were determined to put an end to it. What followed was a demonstration of ruthless force, as police opened fire on the protestors and killed 34 people.
Turkey today has been experiencing another period of instability, and the authorities were determined to keep a tight lid on protest from below. Over 20,000 police surrounded the Taksim Square area on May 1 this year, cordoning the square off from access to anyone. Public transport was closed down, and even ships were forbidden to pass through the port area closest to the square.
But thousands, including many young people, were determined to honour those who had fallen in 1977 and to make their voices heard on International Workers Day. The protestors, whose ranks included a number of revolutionary groups, including members and supporters of the Maoist Communist Party (Turkey and North Kurdistan), were also intent on establishing a revolutionary alternative to both wings of the Turkish establishment: the secular authorities presided over by the generals, and the Islamic politicians of the Justice and Development Party, the AK Party, who currently head up the government.
After a series of skirmishes, a group of several thousand demonstrators broke through the cordons of police surrounding the square and fought their way in. Red flags fluttered, and chants broke out in joy at their accomplishment. Breaking into Taksim Square had great symbolic significance to both sides. Since the bloody events of 1977, the Turkish government had prohibited demonstrations by any progressive forces there in an effort to blot out any memories of what had taken place and of what those events showed about the nature of the Turkish state. But while systematically outlawing progressive events, on National Police Day every year thousands of police filled the square, as the generals engaged in the human equivalent of a dog urinating on a street pole to mark out his territory.
So the breakthrough this year was electrifying. It was also short-lived. In video footage that was shown on television around the world, hordes of baton-wielding police moved in with crushing brutality, cracking heads and sending the protestors scurrying. They detained over 900, according to the Turkish media. Fierce street-fighting with the police also took place in the shantytowns of Okmeydani, Tem oto yoles and several other parts of Istanbul, as well as in other cities around the country.
May Day this year took place amidst an intensifying conflict within the ranks of Turkey’s ruling classes. For many years the ultimate arbiters of power have been the generals who make up the National Security Council. They have simply dissolved elected governments on several occasions. The AK Party, usually described as “moderate Islamic”, is now the dominant party in Parliament and heads up the government. Recently they have proposed that the country’s president be popularly elected, instead of being chosen by parliament, which is generally seen as an effort to increase the power of the presidency. Since the president is the commander in chief of the military, at least in words, this has been viewed with great suspicion by the military as well as by most of the other, more secularly-oriented parliamentary parties. They have responded by mobilising street demonstrations of many hundreds of thousands of people, telling people that they must choose between secular modernism and medieval Islamic theocracy.
Neither of these alternatives offer the people of Turkey anything but more oppression and suffering, and in reality, while fighting each other at times, they have both acted as vicious oppressors of the people of the country. The generals, backed by US imperialism, in fact played a great role in building up the strength of the Islamic forces in the country, particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s, to counter the influence of the communists. To get young people’s minds off the Communist Manifesto and Mao’s Little Red Book, Istanbul’s shantytowns were flooded with copies of the Koran. Mosques sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. Even today the government Department of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet Kurumu, has the fourth largest departmental budget, and state schools routinely provide religious instruction.
For its part, the governing AK Party has presided over a period of modernisation in Turkey’s economy and government, and has been moving the country steadily towards membership in the European Union. Many middle class youth, including in the universities, have gravitated under its wing out of disgust and frustration at their experience of secularism, which has basically meant rule under pro-US governments that ultimately answer to a “benevolent” military junta. While the AK Party has in many ways been a bulwark of modernising Islamism in contrast to the more extremist Islamic Virtue Party, at the same time, it has done this in part by combining economic free-market liberalism with reactionary morality, including an attempt, so far unsuccessful, to criminalize adultery and to introduce other reactionary Islamic oriented laws.
This uneasy relationship between the secular and religious forces within Turkey’s establishment is being pulled at by powerful international compulsions. Turkey has been moving in recent years towards joining the European Union, while the dominant imperialist power in the country is US imperialism. The country has also been shaken by the US aggression in the region, and the intensifying contradiction between US imperialism and the Islamic extremist forces. All this has led to increasing instability in a country that the US has held up as a model of the kind of secular democracy that it wants more of throughout the Middle East. US officials have thus viewed recent developments with growing unease. When the National Security Council’s website bluntly warned the AK Party that if they continued on their current path they could be deposed, the US State Department cautioned that this kind of talk could risk undermining Turkey’s democracy.
The vicious repression brought down on the protestors who broke into Taksim Square taught one important lesson: that whatever disagreements and conflicts may exist between the various sections of the Turkish ruling classes, they are all united on doing whatever they can to stop the rise of a revolutionary alternative that challenges the entire imperialist-backed system in the country.