Turkey's blind spot on the left

In it, Özdemir objects to an interview in Egypt's al-Ahram newspaper with Turkish activist Ozan Tekin, a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party (DSİP). It is a curious piece because though Özdemir is clearly upset about the content of the interview and the perspective Tekin offers on the recent events in Taksim's Gezi Park, he doesn't provide many substantive objections to what Tekin had to say. Indeed, the only concrete criticism he offers is that Tekin does not discuss the property that was damaged during the protests in the interview. Personally, I think there are far more important issues to discuss regarding the protests than burned-out cars or graffiti, but Özdemir is welcome to disagree.

The real problem Özdemir has with Tekin is that he is a Marxist: “When reading the interview with Mr. Ozan Tekin, I am surprised and disappointed to see that his treatment of the subject, as may be expected from a Marxist, is one-sided.” But which side is it that Tekin is supposedly privileging in this interview? Özdemir explains: “We have enough evidence to believe that the election of Mr. Erdoğan as prime minister and Mr. Gül as president -- vis-à-vis a democratic process -- was never accepted as legitimate by the Kemalist establishment and leftist circles.” Tekin, therefore, is biased because he -- as a Marxist -- does not accept the legitimacy of the Turkish government.

The problem with this (other than the rather bizarre expectation that an activist being interviewed about a demonstration he is involved in ought to be non-partisan) is that it is entirely false. To begin with, Tekin has been interviewed twice by al-Ahram and in both cases he has noted that the Turkish government has the support of 50 percent of the Turkish electorate. That is not a particularly convenient fact for those who would deny the democratic legitimacy of the government, so one wonders why Tekin would bring it up if that was indeed his goal.

More importantly, if Özdemir had taken the time to familiarize himself with the views of Tekin and the party he represents, he would have seen that one of their biggest priorities is putting an end to anti-democratic trends in Turkish politics, particularly in the form of putchist generals and their Kemalist supporters. They played a major role in the “Yetmez ama evet” (Not enough, but yes) campaign that offered support to the government's constitutional reform referendum in 2010 while stressing that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) must move even further in its democratic reforms. It would seem Tekin is not the best figure to hold up to harangue for not accepting the democratic legitimacy of the AKP.

I raise this issue not just to point out the serious flaws in Özdemir's article, but to draw attention to a broader problem in Turkish politics: the inability to conceptualize Turkey's left as anything other than a vicious band of Kemalists, Stalinists and bomb-throwing anarchists.

It is certainly true that the Turkish left includes many groups with a rather tenuous grasp on history and the concept of democracy. Some have even been involved in violent attacks on civilians (though to be fair to the anarchists, the left-wing bomb throwers in Turkey are actually most often Stalinists). But the same is true of the Turkish right (both religious and nationalist), so that would hardly seem to be a sufficient argument for its wholesale dismissal, unless we're to give up on politics entirely.

This blindness to the actual contours of the left was reflected over the past three weeks in the way in which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his supporters cast about descriptors of the leftist groups participating in the protests with the accuracy of a shotgun. The park, they suggested, was infested by “marginal” and “illegal” groups. They have never bothered, of course, to specify which groups are merely “marginal” and which illegal, since that would defeat the point of this discourse.

Marginal is a term that, like so many others in the Turkish political lexicon -- including the very word “meaningful” -- lacks any actual meaning.  In this case, it is used repetitively along with the term “illegal” to create an association between any left-wing group lacking mass backing and illegality and violence.

But it is a necessary fact of politics that any new movement will begin with a small following. And if the government and its sympathizers are sincere in their endlessly repeated complaints about Turkey's lack of an effective opposition, they will have to at the very least stop pre-empting the emergence of such opposition with canned responses long past their expiration date.