Turkey's involvement in Gulf War triggers opposition among workers

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6 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1991 Turkey was potentially a major actor in the war against Iraq, and may be even more of one in the post-war situation. It has historically claimed a large area in northern Iraq and intervened during the Iran-Iraq war to prevent the Kurdish nationalist groups from profiting from weaknesses in the Iraqi regime.

Therefore, the following article from the February issue of Socialist Outlonk (a British Fourth Internationalist journul) remains timely. It has been edited for style and space.

Turkey is now involved in the Gulf War, with the roar of U.S. warplanes leaving Incirlik air base every day on bombing sorties to Iraq. Soon a 200,000-strong Turkish army could be engaged in a land offensive on Iraq's northern border. However, as in Egypt and Syria, the Turkish government's determination to drag its people into this war is in conflict with popular opinion.

In January, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated for peace in Istanbul and Iskenderun, and in every major province on Jan. 25 and 26.

Clashes with police and troops are still going on in which the police are reported to have opened fire on crowds, killing at least one man and injuring many. Details of this recent uprising have been suppressed by the current censorship in the British [and international] media.

The peculiarity of the antiwar opposition in Turkey is its class character: Unlike the religion-inspired movements throughout the Middle East, it has emerged out of a wave of industrial action by workers.

There was, of course, a significant antiwar (continued from page 4: “The crushing of Iraq: Ushering in the new world order?”)

as a warning, primarily, to the workers and farmers of Western Europe and Asia-which were then seething with revolt-as well as to the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy.

Of course, we cannot discount the effect of the August 1945 display of destructive power on any potential rivals to American domination in the imperialist camp itself. As we shall see, this last factor is not an unimportant additional motive for U.S. imperialism's current bloody adventure in the Gulf.

Collapse of capitalist stability The world is once again on the brink of a major collapse of capitalist economic, financial, monetary, and political stability. American economic power, although still dominant, has lost ground to its competitors-primarily to Germany and Japan.

The U.S. economy has just entered a recession whose depth and duration cannot be predicted. The savings and loan system is in collapse. The banks, too, are on the verge of collapse. The system of federal deposit insurance is bankrupt. City, state, and federal insolvency mounts at an increasing rate. And the costs of the Gulf War heavily add to the deficit.

Moreover, Stalinism has been dealt an irreparable blow by the uprising which swept across Eastern Europe. Now these countries, and the Soviet Union as well, are in turmoil. And, so far, the ruling castes seem unable to make the transition to a market-driven economy. This is not good news to world capitalism.

Gorbachev, now, has added his voice to those warning of the deepening crisis and the threat of civil war in the USSR. He knows that if his Stalinist cohorts and their petty bourgeois "democratic" allies are unable to break the resistance of the workers to the pre-capitalist "reforms"-a reduction in wages, a rise in prices, an increase in labor intensity, and a generalized elimination of the most extensive social welfare system in the world—imperialists will not risk their capital. feeling and an opposition to the government's warmongering role from the very beginning of the Gulf crisis, within every layer of society, which was expressed even by the far-right president's right-wing rival, Süleyman Demirel: "Our president is turning us into an American aircraft carrier".

There had also been anti-imperialist student unrest since November last year, when a 16-year-old girl was arrested and threatened with 24-years imprisonment for writing antiwar slogans on a school wall.

Miners on strike

But these initial responses to the imperialist war drive spread around the country to develop into a mass movement only after 48,000 miners in Zonguldak went on strike on Dec. 1 in the biggest all-out industrial action in Turkey since the 1980 coup d'etat.

The miners' main demand was for a decent living wage. Average monthly earnings are currently 400,000 lira [$140], even lower than those of South African miners, who are considered to be one of the most oppressed sections of the world proletariat.

They also demand safety in mines, where 3000 have died in accidents over the last 10 years. The average life expectancy of a Zonguldak miner is 47 years.

President Ozal's initial response to the miners' demands was very similar to that of Thatcher's hard line against the British miners' strike in 1984. He denounced the action as being illegal and threatened pit closures. About 10,000 troops and police have been sent in from other provinces.

However, this provocative position has only deepened the unpopularity of the government and of Ozal in particular, and solidarity with the miners' strike has quickly become a symbol for political opposition.

Without new capital for industrial modernization, the Soviet economy would continue its tailspin, and a new stage in the socialist revolution will open up. This is what Gorbachev and his former Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, really fear. This is what American imperialism fears.

"The new world order" may well see U.S. troops entering the Soviet Union to help the Stalinist bureaucracy put down workers' uprisings!

The neo-colonial world has long been bankrupt. It flounders and sinks ever deeper. It continues to be ravaged by ever-worsening poverty, inflation, unemployment and new outbreaks of diseases, like cholera-once thought to have been effectively contained in Iraq before the bombing. Meanwhile, the threat to the planet's environment deepens and has been worsened by the massive oil spills and fires in the Gulf.

(The claim by America's rulers that the Iraqis are responsiole for this and other "atrocities" is far less compelling than that it is a logical result of the ton-a-minute bombardment of Iraq by the imperialist brigands.)

House of cards The developing crisis of world capitalism is the other side of the Persian Gulf story. No one knows what event will trigger a collapse of this house of cards. The U.S. adventure in the Gulf is not a result of strength, but is a desperate attempt by American imperialism to prepare to meet the coming crises; to gird for inevitable revolutionary upsurges and civil wars which are now casting their shadows before them.

Furthermore, they will not hesitate to use their military power to "convince" their imperialist competitors to make economic and trade concessions to U.S. capitalists when necessary.

Yes, the U.S. imperialist victory in the Gulf is a defeat for all its victims. But the unprecedented upsurge of opposition to this war here in the United States and throughout the world is proof that lessons learned by the exploited and oppressed, as well as those from the more privileged layers of society Nearly all of Turkey's 2 million unionized workers boycotted work on Jan. 3, ignoring the constitutional ban on general strikes and solidarity strikes imposed by the generals in 1983.

With workers shouting slogans of "the miners are not alone" and "no to war", this was effectively the first general strike in the country's history. By that time, 10,000 metal workers had already begun striking with demands similar to those of the miners.

On Jan. 4, 100,000 people left the Black Sea coal-mining town of Zonguldak to embark on a march to the capital to protest against the government's anti-labor position. After three days on the road, the strikers, their wives, and children had travelled 100 kilometers and had reached the trans-Turkey motorway.

Here, however, hundreds of riot police and troops backed by water cannons and bulldozers blocked the way. For two days, the miners attempted to pass peacefully but were repulsed. Security forces arrested 326 miners and refused to allow some supplies through to feed the huge mass of protesters.

After another night out on the freezing mountainside, it seemed the miners either had to enter into a violent clash with security forces or return to Zonguldak. They decided on a "tactical retreat"-as they call it— and marched back to Zonguldak, but their strikes continue with support from workers and trade unions all around the world.

solidarity actions These new workers' actions have also mobilized Turkish and Kurdish communities in Europe and Britain in solidarity actions. Kurdish and Turkish workers in London boycotted work on Jan. 3 in coordination with the one-day general strike in Turkey.

who can see farther ahead, is cumulative.

The phenomenal rise in mass consciousness evidenced by two national mobilizations against the Gulf war of hundreds of thousands on Jan. 19 and half a million on Jan. 26—in the U.S. alone-is not negated by this lost battle in the class war against capitalist anarchy, exploitation, and social injustice.

in the Gulf, bob liked working-class neighborhood] also refused to open, in a defiant action of solidarity.

A Solidarity Committee with Striking Miners of Turkey has been set up in London to build solidarity between British workers and the labor movement in Turkey, and to collect money to support their struggle. A campaign against the Turkish government's war drive is also now on the agenda.

Millions of other workers are due to strike by February and March, but they now face the prospect of all industrial action being banned—with the Gulf War being used as the excuse.

This explains why a major element in the strikes has been a strong-antiwar sentiment in defiance of President Ozal's plans for a pre-emptive strike on Baghdad by which he is hoping to demonstrate just how good a friend he is of George Bush, and to overcome his domestic unpopularity by becoming one of the strategic thinkers of Turkish history.

"We want to be invited to the victory banquet, not to be on the menu," says one of Ozal's colleagues, hinting at the imperialist aspirations of the Turkish government for a slice of the post-war Middle East, which are embarassingly obvious.

Moreover, the circumstances of war and confusion provide the government with a rare opportunity for a decisive suppression of the "Kurdish intifada" in southeastern Turkey.

Turkey is now at the crossroads either to political freedom or Bonapartist dictatorship, and the latter possibility has been reinforced by the threats of war.

All the social democrat and leftist union leaders have already declared that if President Ozal drags the country into the imperialist war in the Middle East, they will once again support the demands from below for a general strike.

In short, the Turkish labor movement's growing realization of its strength after a decade of restrictions represents an important challenge to the government's war drive.

In contrast with the pseudo-patriotic slogan to "Free Kuwait," workers of Turkey have developed the slogans of "Free Palestine, Free Kurdistan, Free Turkey!"

We have every reason to be optimistic over the ability of the masses to absorb the lessons of history. To recover from this setback. To renew the task of organizing a fighting scientific political movement based on the historic tasks of the world working class. And to take humanity forward to the next stage of human progress—to a genuinely new, world socialist order.

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