Here's a piece that's due out shortly.
Joanna --------------------------
The Standing Man of Turkey T. Sabri Öncü
On June 16, after describing the brutal events that took place in the evening of June 15 and covered extensively by the international media, Taksim Solidarity – an umbrella group that initiated the Gezi Park protest on May 27 – issued the following statement on their web site.
“The government has committed a crime against humanity.”
This description of the events of June 15 is correct in that what is going on in Turkey can no longer be called police brutality only. A police force, brainwashed for years and trained to hate anyone who does not think like them, has been attacking innocent people to wound and kill since May 31. Four have been killed so far, more than 7,500 have been wounded and thousands detained by the police, during which they had been tortured. Most of the injuries are serious, leaving many disabled or blind for the rest of their lives, and whereabouts of many of the detainees are not known as of writing on June 18.
The police brutality has reached unforeseen levels since June 15 and confrontations between the police and protestors have been going on in more than sixty cities around the country. In a statement right after the brutal police attack on Gezi Park in the evening of June 15, the Turkish EU Minister Egemen Bagis said, “Unfortunately from now, the state will have to consider whoever is in Taksim as a member of a terrorist organization.” Apparently, Bagis was serious since even the medical doctors who are attending the wounded in several districts of Istanbul are now called “terrorists in white shirts” and treated accordingly.
The Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) took power in 2002. Since then, it won three elections in a row, getting about 50% of the vote in the last election in 2011. The AKP now has a more than two-thirds majority in the national assembly, which allows the government to pass any law as it pleases. It controls the police force, which allows it to arrest or suppress anyone. It controls the justice system, which enables the government to prosecute whomsoever it likes. It controls the military, which allows the AKP to dream of regional hegemony, Ottoman style. Finally, the AKP controls all of the important economic and financial institutions — from the finance ministry to the central bank —, which allows the Erdogan government to shape economic policies irrespective of the needs of the population.
In an article published at The Guardian on June 16, the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu claimed that while they view peaceful protests as part of a democratic system, they had to strike a balance between this principle and maintaining public order. And, in a statement on June 17, the Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said, “If the events spread, with the request of the governors, the military troops in the regions can also be deployed to ensure public order, following the police and gendarme.”
Davutoglu described what they do as follows.
“The protests began as a peaceful environmental movement opposing a government plan for development. Unfortunately, violent extremist groups hijacked their democratic demands. No democratic government would allow any illegal or illegitimate group to undermine public order, attack the police and destroy public and private property. However, there have been some mistakes in the use of force against the protesters, and the government has expressed regret. Investigations into these incidents are under way, and those responsible are already being held accountable.”
The people in the streets come from many walks of life, age groups, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations and ideologies. There are university and high school students in the streets, socialists, anarchists, ecologists, environmentalists, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals, nationalists, Kemalists, apolitical folk and even some voters of the AKP. Among the 118 members of Taksim Solidarity are the Unions of Turkish Physicians, Dentists and Pharmacists, many chambers of the Union of the Chambers of Architects and Engineers of Turkey, the Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Unions, the Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions, two main opposition parties, namely, the Republican Peoples’ Party and Independence and Democracy Party, and many small socialist parties such as Freedom and Solidarity Party and the Party of Labor. None of these chambers, unions, parties and other organizations is either illegal or illegitimate, except perhaps in the eyes of the governing neo-liberal neo-Ottomanist AKP.
Unlike Davutoglu’s claims, the ongoing Turkish uprising of May 27 has nothing to do with some illegal or illegitimate groups trying to undermine public order, attack the police and destroy public and private property. This is a civil, spontaneous and politically unaffiliated movement of a diverse groups of people who are fighting for human dignity against an increasingly authoritarian party aiming to regulate social, economic and private life as it pleases, and pushing for a conservative Islamic life style threatening in particular women and youth, criminalizing and imprisoning oppositional groups ranging from seculars to Kurds, socialists, and trade unionists. Although the mainstream media argues that this is essentially a mainly secular and amorphous middle class movement, what connects these diverse groups of people is that majority of their members need to sell their labor power to live. Therefore, although it is not possible to identify the movement with the industrial proletariat in a Marxian sense, there is little doubt that majority of its members belongs to a new proletariat that has been emerging since the early 1980s.
In search of culprits for the ongoing uprising from below, the AKP has invented many conspiracy theories. Identified conspirators range from the international media to “terrorist” social media organizations such as Twitter and Facebook, a shadowy lobby – called the “interest rate lobby” – consisting of national and foreign financial institutions that wants higher interest rates in Turkey, and even the “undemocratic” European Parliament jealous of the economic miracle of the AKP.
The fact is that the AKP has never presided over an economic miracle. The austerity based economic model of the AKP has been nothing but a neoliberal speculation and finance-led growth model of development that has been in the works since the early days of Thatcher and Reagan around the globe, and familiar to Indians. Through its economic policies, the AKP has been imposing their neoliberal agenda by increasingly commercializing public services, creating areas of rent for large corporations, and eroding the living standards and security of a significant part of the working people.
The AKP growth model depends on cheap labor, speculative financial capital inflows and a high trade deficit. The share of industrial production is decreasing and becoming increasingly more dependent on the imports of intermediate and capital goods as well as energy. The agricultural production is weak and the meat production is virtually nonexistent to the extent that even the well-liked Turkish kebabs are now grilled with imported meat from such faraway places as Argentina.
It is usually argued that the AKP significantly raised the national income and the prosperity of Turkish population. This statement is correct only in the averages. Although there are minor improvements that can quickly reverse if the AKP economic miracle collapses, the income distribution is still skewed to the poor. And, the income distribution is still so fat at the rich tail that the rich tail can easily be called obese. If the Gini coefficient is any measure of income equality, India beats Turkey by far, .34 to .40 in 2010 , respectively, and the lower is the Gini coefficient, the lower is the income inequality.
It is argued also that the AKP pushed reforms that made housing, education and healthcare more accessible. True, the construction sector constitutes about six percent of the annual GDP – equaling the share of the manufacturing sector – and many cities around the country look like huge construction sites. Many of the new apartment buildings in gated communities with security guards are beyond the reach of the majority of working people and many of those new apartments that are sold are sold on easy credit. The Housing Development Administration constructed buildings are of low quality and are usually made available to the supporters of the AKP. A new shopping mall or another commercial real estate gets started almost every other day, and many shops in the new shopping malls sit empty with the slowing consumption. Debates have been going on about the possibility of a US or Spain-like credit fueled real estate bubble in Turkey , with the proponents of the AKP denying the possibility.
As for the increased access to education, another private university pops up almost every other month, taking the quality of higher education further down and rising the debt burden of the families who want to provide their kids with a university education. Most graduates of these universities are not able find well paying jobs after graduation and the unemployment rate among the youth is above 20 percent. Further, healthcare is available to anyone who can pay for it, except that majority of the hospitals are now private, the care they provide is expensive, and the quality of affordable care at the state hospitals is going down due to cost cutting and the increased work load of the doctors, nurses and other personnel.
The AKP economic miracle of the past decade has risen on two pillars. First, fueling of consumption through excessive credit. The main driving force behind the country's recent economic growth has been nothing but a spectacular rate of credit expansion, which reached 30 percent for households and 40 percent for business in 2011. Second, rent extraction through privatization of the commons from land to public enterprises, spaces and buildings to natural resources. Indeed, Gezi Park that triggered the ongoing rebellion is one of the latest examples of attempted privatization of the commons.
Neither of these strategies is sustainable.
Further, not only are the households are in significant debt – with a debt to disposable income ratio of about 45 percent in 2011 – but also is the corporate sector. Although the AKP takes pride in having paid the last installment of its debt to the IMF, Turkey has borrowed increasingly more in the international financial markets during its reign, shifting the foreign debt burden from the public to the private sector.
While the total foreign debt stock of Turkey in 2002 was $130 billion with 67 percent owed by the public sector, the foreign debt stock in 2012 was $337 billion with 67 percent owed by the private sector. In addition, while only 13 percent of the total foreign debt stock was short term in 2002, the short-term debt constituted 30 percent of the total foreign debt stock in 2012. More importantly, 88 percent of the short-term debt belonged to the private sector and 66 percent of it belonged to the private financial sector in 2012.
This effectively turned the Turkish private sector into a shadow bank, which borrows short term in rollover debt markets, leverages significantly and invests in long-term and illiquid assets, making the Turkish corporations, in general, and Turkish private banks, in particular, vulnerable to currency shocks that may lead to collective bankruptcies. The AKP economic miracle recalls the experiences of Mexico in 1994 and Argentina in 2000 where surging external debt produced short-lived bubbles of prosperity, followed by currency devaluations and deep slumps. No wonder the Prime Minister Erdogan is worried about an imagined “interest rate lobby”.
As the economic miracle of the AKP evaporates, its ability to govern will vanish. The Turkish uprising of May 27 is only a dress rehearsal. There has been relative clam in the streets of Istanbul for the last two days and the Taksim Square was reopened to the public under heavy police surveillance on June 17. At 18:30 on July 17, a man started standing in the middle of Taksim Square and had stood there for six hours, staring at the flags and a poster of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the nearby Ataturk Cultural Centre. Shortly after it became clear that he was staging a protest to oppose to the ongoing police brutality and oppression of basic human rights in Turkey, the hashtag # duranadam , or standing man, hit Twitter and became the number one trending topic worldwide.
Once again, it is kicking off everywhere and there are now many standing men and women around the world. From Turkey to Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil people are in struggle for real democracy against the neo-liberal state. The world will not be the same after the uprising of May 27 in Turkey.