Nazan Üstündağ, 8 Haziran 2013
[This article was translated from Turkish by Emrah Yildiz]
The tweet I circulated before I went to the Gezi park on Thursday read “Could this place turn into a Tinnamen or a Tahrir? Why not?” Under certain conditions those things that we cannot fully grasp on the level of conscience, we simply sense subconsciously. I must have sensed without knowing it; what a full blown resistance would break out of a park which we were protecting against demolition under state’s renovation plan. Taksim where the park is located was after all, the only remaining public space in Istanbul for those in opposition. The government wanted to turn the park into a Shopping Mall.
As members of opposition in Turkey (for various reasons), we have been shuttling back and forth between conferences for the past month about the peace process recently initiated between the Turkish state and the PKK. All social classes had become dynamic, if not ecstatic with movement. Everybody had expectations of their own from the peace process. Also, for at least the past year universities were full of movement against state pressure and student arrests. So were the feminists. And for the past few years, as a handful of activists, scholars and organizers, be it in press releases, writing workshops, demonstrations or meetings, we have been spending almost all of our week in and around Taksim square. A Taksim, now under construction.
Indeed, entire Turkey has been under construction. Every single place we have known intimately was being demolished and rebuilt. Or to remain more loyal to the language of the government, these spaces were being “renewed.” Spaces are also charters of memory: The unplanned, large and small buildings, and the dusty spaces squeezed among them, and even the weeds growing in sites of prolonged construction, carry not only the memories of urban struggles of survival, those of labor and laborers and those of marginalization, but also those of our roots in villages and those of where we had otherwise come from. Under the banner of “renewal,” not only were places being demolished and constructed anew. The very memories of city were being rewritten. The city was being transformed into a cold set for a science-fiction film.
Being an urban dweller is about dwelling in a border landscape at the same time. It is about having borderline experiences. A city, after all, is a spatial construct where alcohol and other vices are produced and consumed, where forbidden pleasures in unknown nooks emerge as the inviting promises, where strange bed fellowships and social assemblages emerge out of even stranger coincidences. Under the banner of “urban renewal,” the moralist cleaning operation of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) aimed at disciplining and gentrifying all the nooks of Istanbul, all those, who were displaced from their corners and stripped of their memories, were being pulled toward one another with great speed.
Everybody’s lifeworlds, let alone “lifestyles,” seemed under threat. During the Human Rights Federation Conference convened ten days ago, the Minister of Human Rights, Beşir Atalay, had claimed that the AKP was normalizing Turkey. Yet, for a rather long time, the lives of Kurds, Alevis, women, LGBT individuals, the poor and even soccer fans have been under exceptional pressure, if not full-blown attack. Walter Benjamin argues that what is exceptional in the lives of the oppressed is the very normalization of this exceptional nature of the oppression. Benjamin in turn invites the oppressed individuals, classes and communities to resist by creating their own exceptions and exceptional acts and spaces out of every day ordinariness and by creating exceptions of the oppressors’ every day. Since Thursday, widely diverse groups, communities and classes in Turkey have been responding to this invitation. To go back to the Human Rights Confederation Conference, Turkey’s President, who had talked about how the successes of Turkey have transformed the country into a regional powerhouse, in response to the protests going into their eigth day yesterday, couldn’t abstain from tweeting: “One is really amazed [at the demonstrations.]”
***
Over the course of last 30 years, Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere in the region have reconstructed themselves as a people. With respect to their spaces, social relations, views on gender and ecology, understandings of leadership, political parties, and last but least with respect to their relation with history and truth. Unceasingly and indefatigably, they told the truth to the Turks. They spoke of the history of a 100-year-old catastrophe. Of mass graves filled with unidentified bones of three different generations. Of disappearances, abuses, rapes and assassinations—perpetrators of which remain unknown or undisclosed to this day. They have constructed a different hope with the guerrillas, across their reclaimed mountain fields, in cities where they were forced to move in search of a new life. They have theorized life anew and have been practicing this new theory of hope and life in the metropols of Turkey since their villages were systemically burned in the 1990s. Every day they revolted against the state a new. Confronted with this new theory and praxis of life and hope, the Turkishness—which firmly embraced its state, and nothing but its state—remained blind and deaf until this day.
That said, however, it is important to highlight here that the relationship between peoples is organic as much it is ideological and material as much as it is discursive. Indeed, the differential existence of Kurds in urban setting, their differential resistance, their differential memory and knowledge of and in the world on the one hand, and the otherness they have shared with those standing in solidarity with them, touched the Turks too. Kurds’ words that succeeded at breaking through media censorship into the general public, their pictures resisting police brutality, their humanist and people-based reassemblage worked into the subconscious of the Turkish public. The universality of their woman- and ecology-based ideology enabled many belittled political factions within Turkish political life—such as anarchist, feminist, ecological and student movements—to find a political footing in their respective struggles.
Social media during Kurdish political prisoners hunger strikes, particularly the facebook-based open-source newsfeed Hunger Strike Post, which later transformed itself into The Others’ Post, was able to succeed against the much revered media censorship of the authoritarian regime. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s now infamous first response to the hunger strikes, namely that “they [Kurdish politicians] are eating lamb kebabs,” having confronted the pictures circulating in social media, had simply frozen in the air the moment they were uttered, fallen to the ground, and shattered. It was that loud noise of shattering, that of denial and censorship, which had brought the numbers of hunger strikers to 10,000 and paved the way to the ongoing peace process now.
Denial and censorship rendered as banal and pragmatic during the hunger strikes have subsequently become increasingly more visible and troublesome for the general public. Partially due to this realization, Twitter and Facebook have become the spaces to know, get uncensored news and organize. It is again Benjamin who talks about the revolutionary possibilities that technology opens up. It is no exaggeration to claim therefore that social media has been recently experienced at least for previously marginalized political factions and individuals in Turkey in the most revolutionary fashion, generating those strange coincidences out of which unthinkable political and social alliances and differential social relations emerge. In other words, for those tired of seeing Prime Minister’s face on television, electronic and social media have become an alternative modality of being in and of the world in Turkey.
The increasingly dominating presence of the prime minister on television screens has entrenched on lifeworlds of a very large and all the more diverse portion of the general public. We were having difficulty even understanding the logical progression of his speeches: how he moved from the “operational mistake” of massacring 34 villagers in Uludere with newly acquired drones to an abortion debate, or how he moved from the bombings in Reyhanli to a new alcohol law. He was angrier, ruder, more self-confident and self-obssessed every time he opened his mouth. He had made a habit of misrepresenting the grievances and objections of the opposition in a belittling and increasingly condescending fashion. His speeches that outlined his party’s plans for 2023 (100th year anniversary of the foundation of the republic) and 2071 (1000th year anniversary of Turkish arrival of Anatolia) did not give hope of stability to people. They suffocated them. Nobody wants their future to be reduced to one possibility.
The political enigma also called the main opposition on the other hand, with an outmoded ambition of modernist politics, was trying to forge its criticism of the AKP through the even more outmoded idiom of secularism. Binaries broken down and lived in every day were being re-made and fed to the public to polarize them. Yet, our bodies have been too sick, and our subconscious in too much pain to stomach these renewed products.
One usually asks “why that particular day?” thinking about big social explosions. There is no need to raise such a question in the case of Turkey. The third Bosphorus bridge and the new airport are coming to claim Istanbul’s last breath. To make matters worse, the bridge is named after a notorious Ottoman Sultan, Yavuz Sultan Selim who is known to have massacred Alevites. The Gezi Park was the last space we knew intimately in Taksim that the urban renewal project aimed at reconstructing. And however far it might seem, the exiled poet Nazim Hikmet had once said, “as one and free like a tree, and in solidarity like a forest.”
Now, the PKK guerillas are relocating from Turkey to Iraq, and giving one last chance to the state. Not the state but the people of Turkey have taken up that chance. Turks had for a long time accumulated anger, insecurity, mourning in their abdomens and had restored to racism, indifference and an empire of fear to suppress these. The gas of the police while clouding their vision, has also caused them to face their truth: While they were being manipulated by a meaningless war against Kurds, they were being denied their life spaces, their past, their reality, their freedom of expression and association by an ever growing alliance of capitalism and state. One should give credit to the AKP where it is due, however. AKP’s success in paralyzing the military and taking it practically out of decades-old political calculus of the country is part of the picture. Otherwise, could we have imagined any of this?
***
At the forefronts of the demonstrations, we see women. Women, whose bodies have been violated and abused, whose recreational organs have become topics of debate in the words and laws of the state. There are the Kurdish and Turkish revolutionaries, who have learned how to resist and fight together, how to take cobblestones off the paved streets, how to throw the teargas canisters back at the police in their long struggle against the state. There are the environmentalists, who know how to stand shoulder to shoulder and care for the wounded and weaker ones and there are the students who know how to have fun and enjoy themselves together while tweeting and standing gas at the same time. There are LGBT individuals who have been verbally abused by the homophobic AKP politicians just a week ago. There the anti capitalist Muslims who have been standing in solidarity with the anti nationalist Communists and Kurds for some time now. And then there are the anarchists who are against the gas, the liquid and the solid state of the…state. Also, those who are sick and tired of the outmoded politics of the republican part CHP are there and lawyers and doctors and nurses. Finally, there are the soccer fans who have always made this city a little unruly, a little vulgar, a little exuberant. In other words, a people who were promised a more democratic society, a new Constitution and a real process of facing the truth of the past and who were then failed utterly; a people who desire freedom, justice, and identity, stand together at the forefronts of the demonstrations.
A politically unorganized people is highly likely to resort to reflexes. Tomorrow everything might end, the demonstrations might dissipate. Or they might turn more nationalist. More masculinist. We are talking about a people, who have not produced a slogan of dissent over 30 years since the military coup of 1980, who have not created a political language except for the nationalist songs learned at schools, who lack a political symbol except for their flag, and who lack a political ideology besides their material demands and their desires to construct their lives anew. In a press release during the hunger strikes, Kurdish strikers had extended an invitation to all democratic factions within Turkey: “Give a hand to our people who has now risen up.” Now, the same invitation is uttered by the Turkish civil resistance with the same voice of urgency. For years, analysts and activists alike agreed on one fact about political life in Turkey: the inability of oppositional politics to mobilize the masses. Now the masses are mobilized, and the people have risen up. Everything could be transformed. It is time to give these people a hand. Maybe, and maybe only then, the people of Turkey could achieve peace, and help contribute to creating a stateless alliance of peoples based on social justice, an alliance comprising the entire Middle East.
Quotes:
Everybody’s lifeworlds, let alone “lifestyles,” seemed under threat. During the Human Rights Federation Conference convened ten days ago, the Minister of Human Rights, Beşir Atalay, had claimed that the AKP was normalizing Turkey. Yet, for a rather long time, the lives of Kurds, Alevis, women, LGBT individuals, the poor and even soccer fans have been under exceptional pressure, if not full-blown attack.
A politically unorganized people is highly likely to resort to reflexes. Tomorrow everything might end, the demonstrations might dissipate. Or they might turn more nationalist. More masculinist. We are talking about a people, who have not produced a slogan of dissent over 30 years since the military coup of 1980, who have not created a political language except for the nationalist songs learned at schools, who lack a political symbol except for their flag, and who lack a political ideology besides their material demands and their desires to construct their lives anew.