Turkish Communists Mobilise Against NATO Summit

As NATO’s leaders converge on Ankara for their summit on the 7th to 8th of July, the Turkish state has turned its own capital into a garrison of imperialism. Roads are blocked, whole districts closed off, public workers sent home and giant billboards raised to hide the poor neighbourhoods that line the foreign delegates’ route. It’s a fitting image of what these imperialist alliances offer the working class, your city emptied so that the planners of war and genocide can meet comfortably.

On Sunday the 5th of July, the Communist Party of Turkey defiantly rallied against this summit. Ignoring the 13 day ban on public demonstrations, press statements and gatherings, party members marched into Kızılay, the central square of Ankara. Riot police met them with tear gas, beatings and arrests. Hundreds were detained, including senior party leaders. Similar demonstrations occurred throughout Turkey, including a mass rally held in Istanbul.

The TKP had fulfilled its promise made weeks in advance to the Turkish working class that it would not let this summit pass in silence and that no amount of repression would prevent it from mobilising its working class base to show the imperialist warmongers that they are not welcome there.

The repression was not limited to the protest itself. In a cowardly attempt to temper dissent, the Turkish state arrested in dawn raids hundreds of trade unionists, lawyers, journalists and militant student organisers in the weeks beforehand. TKP members were also detained for the crime of putting up posters. Miloš Karavezić, First Secretary of the League of the Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ), was arrested with other youth activists while attending an anti-imperialist conference in Istanbul.

Speaking in İstanbul as the detentions unfolded, TKP General Secretary Kemal Okuyan set out the party’s position without hesitation. The communists had gathered across Turkey to protest NATO, he said, and they had refused to hand Ankara over to the alliance’s supporters or to let the capital fall quiet. That promise had now been fulfilled. Days earlier, at a mass İstanbul rally under the slogan “Humanity does not deserve humiliation and death” attended by communist and workers’ parties from NATO member states, along with representatives of the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Democratic Youth.  There Okuyan traced the whole miserable record of Turkey’s NATO membership since 1952, the coups, the murders, the subordination of a country’s dignity to the interests of its exploiting classes. The government, he argued, presents itself openly as pro-NATO while dressing its expansionism in the language of national interest.

Is this the alliance that the Irish ruling class wishes to further drag the peoples into?

Will Dublin be emptied and militarised, with activists and organisers arrested and beaten. We already see repression of our comrades in the North, whose anti-NATO actions stand valiantly in the face of those who would rather ignore their presence there for political gain, such as Sinn Féin. The TKP has shown the way forward with dealing with these summits and any NATO activity. They must be met with a show of strength and force, and not be allowed to go about their business of war and genocide unhindered!