00:00 Sarah Parker: I probably won't go into huge detail about Rojava – people can read it in the pamphlet and elsewhere – but it is a relatively important factor. I'm going to try and start from the broader context and [inaudible] the overall picture of what I think is happening. Obviously you can't go into minute detail in 10 or 15 minutes, but anyway, this is what I think about it. And [inaudible], as I said at the beginning, I haven't seen any sort of word [?] from the British state, really, about what's going on with their top– one of their top allies.
00:40 But many people saw yesterday that John Kerry has put Turkey on notice about its membership of NATO [?], which is kind of huge stuff, with its [inaudible] rhetoric in terms of the need for observance of democratic rules. Which obviously, we know, if you've got state-controlled news [?] putting out footage – I don't know if people have seen – of beaten-up top generals under arrest; and if they're doing that with top generals, one can imagine [?] what shape [inaudible].
01:15 Obviously people are trying to see what's behind the coup. As Phil has said, there was some sort of coup which was evidently quite weak. I mean, I saw Erdoğan on Saturday and he looked quite nervous to me. I mean, my guess is that they probably knew something was going on and let it run a bit. He's a bit of a gambler, he likes– I'm not sure what the poker terms are, but I think he probably thought about facing it down, let it run a bit and dive in. That was my guess, or maybe [inaudible].
01:50 I mean, people should remember that he's been building his base for many years. Seven or eight years ago there were large [?] trials which were partly about trying to purge part of the army that wasn't in line with AKP thinking. So if you're doing stuff like that, and take it as a country where the state is full of factions and intelligence officers anyway, you would expect that the AKP would have quite an apparatus for knowing what other people are doing. Obviously people raised, you know, why didn't they know this coup was happening? What, you know– [inaudible]. I'm not going to spend more time on that; my guess is probably that's what happened.
02:45 Maybe [inaudible]. Also, people have observed the fact that some of the air force and other people [involved in] bombing, bombing Kurdistan [?] are amongst those arrested. A top air force general, I think, has denied that he was involved in the coup. So maybe there is a factor to do with disagreement over the policy of bombing, of bombing Kurdistan [?]: that it's an unsustainable policy. And of course it's being covered up, but the Turkish army has taken quite heavy losses over the past year, which are probably unsustainable in terms of maintaining social consent [?], I'd imagine, [if] anything else.
03:25 So what made this coup and counter-coup [?]... You can say it's a continuation of the rolling coup, or series of coups. You could say it's being, of course, there again a kind of business of periodic purging and then relaxing into normal [inaudible]. So what makes this situation possible, of a current counter-coup? Well, I would say broadly four things allow this to happen.
04:10 The very weak position of the working class in Turkey. I mean, [inaudible] the workers' movement has never been able to recover from the coup in 1980, essentially. You know, yes, there have been some strong phases [?], but there's never been a real recovery. And of course, secondly, Erdoğan's [?] determination to solve the Kurdish question militarily, and refusal to negotiate in good faith. So, you know, this has been a huge thing for years, and it's a huge thing now. I don't know [inaudible] because they've put a lot of people [inaudible], but that's not the same thing.
04:46 Anyway, the sort of crisis of the Turkish state, I suppose, is the third factor, something that's been going on for some years: some sort of splitting or disintegration in the Turkish state. I mean, that is [something that] shows, like the fact that with this coup [?], people can't even make up their minds who was involved in it. And, you know, if I were an international relations person, I might well be saying, is Turkey a failed state soon? And you've got a big army; it's one of the linchpins, supposedly, of NATO; it's been a key part of certainly US foreign policy in the Middle East as a whole. So this is an enormous question, including of course its role in Syria.
05:45 Fourthly, [the] fourth factor that has let this situation [happen] – I've already been touching on it – the implosion, if you like, of the key axes, or some of the key axes, of Erdoğan's project: the neoliberal and [inaudible] Islamic regime around the economy and social life. Well, the economy must be tanking. You know, tourism – I don't know if people saw, [it was] mentioned this this morning, there was a– 15,000 education sector employees have been dismissed, suspended. This is on top of seven or eight thousand people in the judiciary. So it's going to be chaos throughout society, I think, on top of the bombings.
06:40 And obviously tourism is one of the main things; it's sort of not going to be doing well. So this must– these purges and so on must have a knock-on effect on everything, including the economy. In the 90s the IMF happily provided what I called a very generous drip feed to the Turkish economy, while also being [inaudible] – rich people getting richer, [inaudible].
07:15 And the next point: failure to be able to carry out the state or AKP's project of overthrowing Assad and defeating the Syrian Kurds. And that was partly to do with, I would say, the hesitancy– obviously there was resistance to ISIL in Syria, but the Americans seem to have hesitated, maybe changed their mind. You know, they didn't go for broke in supporting Turkey and its allies. So now the Syrian situation is at an impasse. Erdoğan's [?] not been successful. People will have seen he's been making an agreement [?] – mainly, I think, over gas, but it's also political – with Israel, trying to mend fences with Russia, and that's the sign of desperation, I think. But anyway, his Syria policy [inaudible] didn't work. And lastly, [the] continuing need to purge elements of the state that don't support him.
08:35 So I'm going to move on to what are the elements of the resistance. Well, there is the working class in Turkey; there is the sort of opposition who support democracy, freedom of expression, you know. People are tough, but there's not very many of them. I mean, maybe this huge thing of sacking, presumably to be followed by trials and arrests of huge numbers of public sector workers – perhaps that will detonate something, I don't know. Otherwise maybe it will be quite a while before [inaudible].
09:25 And then the other main element, of course, of the resistance is from the Kurdish movement: the guerrillas and the Kurdish movement broadly, and the HDP. Its scope for manoeuvre is being very much cut down; some people were arrested, [?] yesterday. And what's going on in Rojava, which is under threat – I don't know how much this will change with this; I can't get my head around it at the moment. The YPG fighters are still trying to get ISIS out of Manbij [?], to be disposed [?] to shut the ISIS route from Raqqa through Syria into Iraq, with US support. But the Kurdish areas are being shelled from Turkey, I should say. [inaudible] the Turkish army and air force [have] been destabilised, [inaudible] letting up an operation [inaudible] the Syrian [inaudible], you know.
10:30 A couple of minutes on that. So the Kurdish movement is still trying to maintain its course. I mean, the stuff in the book about how they're trying to encourage self-organisation – as we speak there's a conference, quite broad conference, going on in [inaudible], in the south-west [?], maybe with people from the Middle East, not just Kurdish people, with the title "Peace and Stability" [?]: [inaudible] how we get there. So, you know, they're constantly trying to get more people involved in looking for a way forward, [while] the present system can't provide it. It can only provide massive [inaudible] and repression.
11:15 So I mean, I just– there isn't [time] [?] to go into massive detail, but I agree with what Phil said, that there are elements of fascism or fascistic organisation of repression going on. I mean, it's got historical precedents in Turkey, of course. I don't know how [inaudible], but a lot of the people on the streets were AKP supporters. There was a lot of violence, including against conscripts, who probably had nothing to do with anything. I mean, maybe some of them [inaudible], I think probably many of them wouldn't [?]. Quite savage violence.
12:05 And, you know, the symbolic thing, and I think the [inaudible] of all of the strong things, is this polarisation between struggles by oppressed people, especially women, as against mobilisations and encouragement of– mobilisations around [inaudible] and encouragement of misogyny from the AKP. And you can see this in the practice of ISIS, and in the behaviour of the gangs.
12:45 I mean, I saw a tiny video this morning which is kind of emblematic [?]. It was some bloke– some– likely, someone– looked like religiously dressed figures, and somebody had been making comments on how [women] would be dressed. And some women in the street were just screaming at them, and these people were dressed– the women were dressed normally, attired in jeans and jackets. They were screaming at these guys, who thought better of it, got into their van, sheered off. I mean, that's not what always happens, but that sort of encounter is emblematic of what's going on. And when, you know, [inaudible].
13:30 Just one more thing, again coming back to the broad context, and not directly inside Turkey: as well as the complete instability of the whole situation in Syria, whether Rojava or the rest of Syria – where, as we know, there's a mode of war [?]; a kind of Syrian [?] revolution, has that gone too badly, has that gone forever? Don't know where it's going – as well as that, the situation in Iraq is unstable. I mean, there's essentially a condominium between Americans and Iranians over most of Iraq. The Americans try to– and the other interfering powers try to control South Kurdistan, but socially the situation is explosive.
14:18 [inaudible] still a lot of trouble, still war against ISIS. Barzani has the upper hand within the government because of the weaknesses of the other parties [?]. [inaudible] situation is unstable. I'm always seeing American [inaudible] ambassadors – you know, there's a lot of time in the front rooms of the Kurdish party leaders, because they know they've got [inaudible] the situation. So that is not– it's not stable. And of course one of the things that's common to these whole areas is how the Kurdish [?] liberation movement is going to move forward.
14:55 Now, I'm not even sure that the coup, as opposed to [inaudible], is totally over. I think there has been a certain amount of fighting going on that we're not seeing much of in the press [?]. And of course, if you see a massive fist coming down on lots of the army, that might be an incentive to see how things are going and maybe come back, either now or later. And we also don't know what the AKP are planning next in terms of their external intervention.
15:45 I will just say that it is noteworthy that both before the Brussels attack and the recent attack in Paris – sorry, Nice – there were actually threats, what I would interpret as threats, coming from Erdoğan [?]: you know, "attacks can happen anywhere". Personally, I don't think that's mere rhetoric. I think there are links – maybe not in every case – but people know about traffic up and down through Syria and Turkey by people connected with ISIS.
16:20 So we don't know where this counter-coup is going. I mean, I was [noticing] a huge number of civil servants [inaudible]. Where is it going? Where's it going next? We don't know. I think we're sort of [inaudible]. And I think, you know, there's a huge need for solidarity. It's a huge task, but [inaudible] what we can do. [inaudible] As I said at the beginning, as far as we know, the people who run this place are very friendly [?] to the Turkish state. So that is a factor to take into account. [inaudible] in terms of trying to do solidarity with the working class movement in Turkey, with the Kurdish movement, and with the academics who are under increasing threat, to do a lot.
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