Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In recent months, Turkey has been gripped by what amounts to a slow-motion coup on the part of the secular and military establishment. The moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) is facing a ban by the Constitutional Court, even though the AKP controls both the executive and the legislative branches of the government. The AKP deepened its grip on power after the July 2007 elections, in which it won 47% of the vote, one of highest totals ever in Turkey’s multiparty system.

The old secular Kemalist establishment has garnered less than a quarter of the vote in recent elections, even though it still controls the courts, the military, and the universities. It claims that the AKP is slowly working to turn Turkey into a fundamentalist state like Iran. Such exaggerated claims, plus the Kemalists’ long history of authoritarian rule, have led some Turkish progressives to align themselves tacitly with the AKP as a way of opening up greater democracy.

For example, where the Kemalist establishment seeks to maintain the legal ban on Islamic headscarves at universities, some progressives have defended headscarf wearers on the basis of individual choice. Critics of the AKP argue, however, that if headscarves become more common, women will feel increasing pressure to wear them at the risk of being labeled “immoral.” As the feminist writer Nigar Goksel has noted, however, neither the Kemalists nor the AKP are taking up policies “that would render women less vulnerable to such pressure, such as increased socio-economic independence or equal inclusion in decision making” (Turkish Daily News 6/5/08).

Over the years, the left has faced severe repression from the Kemalist state and military establishment, especially after the 1981 military coup. Given the AKP’s rhetoric of democracy and individual rights, some on the left had expected gentler treatment from the AKP. These illusions were punctured on May Day, when the AKP government banned a rally in Istanbul’s Taksim Square that had been organized by the large trade union federation DISK. The government also closed down much of the city’s public transport system to prevent demonstrators from gathering.

DISK called off its march toward Taksim once the level of police violence became clear, but hundreds of others reached Taksim anyway. They were met by baton-wielding police, who beat and teargassed them mercilessly, also employing helicopters and tanks to harass the crowds. Over 500 were arrested. Leftist parliamentarian Ufuk Uras of the Freedom and Solidarity Party castigated the AKP: “They were trying to deprive the workers of their democratic rights with methods dating from the Cold War.”