00:00 Phil Hearse: "...have to carry through the punishments which are appropriate and which the people are demanding, and if the Constitution doesn't give us the ability to do that, then we have to change the Constitution", and so on. And I thought to myself, am I understanding this? He's talking about the death penalty, isn't he? And of course that's what he was talking about, the death penalty. And we knew of course that they were going to have meetings with the other political parties, and the three main other parties: the MHP, which is a fascist party, the continuity of the Grey Wolves of the 70s; the People's Republican Party, which is the old Kemalist, Republican, secular, bureaucratic, authoritarian capitalist party – I'll say more about that in a minute.
01:00 And the third party, the HDP, the Peoples' Democratic Party, they said, "We won't discuss with them because they are a front for the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, and they're terrorists." So they wanted to get the approval of the other two parties, the MHP and the People's Democrat– the People's Republican Party, for the death penalty. People's Republican Party said no. The fascists, and surprisingly, the MHP said yes to the proposal. But this leaves them lacking a parliamentary majority – I don't know what it is, it's probably two-thirds, something like two-thirds, to change the Constitution, that they need – but what they have got a majority for is to have a referendum on the death penalty.
01:50 And so he said, "So we will be making a big Council of State meeting this afternoon and tomorrow we will make a big announcement, very important announcement, which everyone should wait for." I have to tell you – and not a great surprise to anybody who's been watching this – it was scary, scary, absolutely scary, the way this happens: the unanimity, members of parliament waving the Turkish flag all the time while Yıldırım [?] was speaking. That is even in the absence of Erdoğan, the big, the big leader.
02:37 So what we're going to see now, to start with the final question, "what next", is a huge wave of repression, which has already started. The figures are mind-boggling. I don't know, every time you turn on the news it's changed: 30,000, maybe now, people are arrested or fired – police, judges; there are an awful lot of judges in Turkey, by the way, that you can fire, but it's a big country – judges, police, army [?]. And so – but I think the first thing, before we kind of look at what were the forces opposing Erdoğan and who was behind the coup, look at it from the other way: who were the people who came out on the street to fight against the coup?
03:30 And this is presented by the regime, and indeed by some of the Western press, as a spontaneous outpouring of ordinary Turkish people who went out to defend democracy against the coup plotters. It has to be said – I apologise for my dishevelled appearance, it's the hottest day of the year, in the hottest rooms in London, never mind – military coups have got a bad reputation in Turkey, actually, as a– there was a coup in 1960, 1971, 1980, which was the most serious and violent one.
04:07 I would say actually that part– I don't know what Mustafa thinks, but part of the– a significant part of the diaspora, the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora in Germany, Belgium and in Britain, comes from the 1980 coup. All the time, when I was teaching at George Monoux College, Kurdish and Turkish students would say, "My parents came here after 1980." And it absolutely crushed the left and the workers' movement, which is one of the reasons – just one of them – why Islamism was able to become the big alternative to the old corporatist, bureaucratic, secular Kemalist state.
04:50 But all the information coming out, bit by bit – we weren't there – is that the people who mobilised were the hardcore of the AKP, the AK Party, the Islamist party, the government party, together with Islamist organisations, these frightening right-wing organisations, maybe some of the fascists from the MHP, this organisation called the Ottoman Hearths – it's so horrible, you don't want to know about it – but all these are things. And when they came out on the street they didn't just back up the police, who were standing off against the military on the Bosphorus Bridge and in other places, but they attacked the HDP headquarters, they went to Taksim Square and attacked cafés and restaurants where people were drinking alcohol.
05:50 This was a kind of reactionary outpouring. I don't want to underestimate the mass base of the AKP, which is very big, and they're capable of huge mass mobilisations, but it wasn't this kind of outpouring of the masses in defence of democracy that the government like to pretend.
06:20 OK, so where does all this come from? How did we get here, without going back to 1923? And I think the place to start, as really the analysis in this pamphlet starts, the logical place to start, is the election in June 2015, last year, where Erdoğan failed to get a majority. And part of the reason he failed to get a majority was because of the strong vote of the HDP, the Peoples' Democratic Party. The HDP is an interesting kind of party; it's the kind of idea that we will be familiar with, a broad left radical type of party, including the Kurdish movement and socialist, leftist, women's groups, LGBT groups, all kinds of minorities, type of thing.
07:24 And they got 14% of the vote and I think – can't remember, was it 80 MPs? Something like 80 MPs, 80 MPs. And this deprived Erdoğan and the AKP of their majority. Now why was that such a big deal? Because it was still overwhelmingly the biggest party and would still be in the government and so on. It was such a big deal because Erdoğan had the ambition to change the Constitution, to change it to a presidentialist dictatorship – you can call it more or less that kind of presidentialist regime – to push aside the trappings of democracy and diminish the role of Parliament and the opposition parties.
08:10 And from the moment that he didn't get the majority because of the vote of the HDP, that was it, everything changed. First of all they started what we call in the pamphlet the strategy of tension: of bombings, of incidents, and the bizarre thing's bombing rallies, left-wing rallies, and accusing the PKK of doing it – or, but, creating an atmosphere of tension, of crisis; say the PKK, it was ISIS – and creating this atmosphere: "We have to have a strong government to stop this crisis."
08:55 And then, so, Erdoğan decided that the answer the electorate had given was wrong and they had to try again. So another election was organised for October, and at that election, after these bombings, after the crisis – and incidentally in that second election it was virtually impossible for the HDP to campaign as it had done previously, because all their meetings were attacked by, you know, the AKP, other right-wing groups; the police used to attack their headquarters, attack their rallies; the leadership of the HDP refused to appear on television because of it – and the result was a little shift towards Erdoğan, which gave him the majority. And if you analyse why there was that little shift, it was because a section of the fascist vote, 4%, went over to the AKP, which gave them the majority.
10:00 But the key thing that they decided to do, the key thing – which is the big question which goes right the way through every aspect of Turkish politics – is restart the war against the Kurds. That's the key thing: restart the war against the Kurds. Sarah will say more about this, but it involves two things in my view, two fundamental things. The first is the war in south-east Turkey, so-called North Kurdistan, and a military attack on those villages, cities, which had kind of declared autonomy. It's all connected with the PKK's new line of confederalism, and the Turkish government saw that obviously as a threat: that section of the country basically declared autonomy.
11:00 And the assault that they launched – absolutely, absolutely out of this world. And it's one of the things – this is a country next to Greece; if it had happened in Greece it would have been front-page news every day. More than 1,000 people, mainly civilians, were killed by the Turkish army. They attacked those cities, which were being defended mainly by youth but also by some PKK fighters probably, with planes, with artillery – most violent military attack possible.
11:36 And the second aspect of it – again, Sarah will speak more about this – to attack the enclaves in northern Syria, which are kind of liberated zones and which they are, yes, they're trying to link up, and which in general is– they call Rojava. It's basically a self-, autonomous, self-governing space, with its own armed people's protection unit, which is based on self-management and which is independent, obviously, from the Syrian state and the Turkish state. Obviously this is just on the border with Turkish Kurdistan. It's a massive threat: you can just go over there, you're in Turkish Kurdistan, who incidentally are trying to create autonomy. The obvious potential is for some kind of link-up.
12:40 And the other aspect of it, of course, has been that the Kurds have been trying to interrupt the supplies of weapons and other backup which Turkey has been sending to ISIS. This is that aspect of the thing which the Turkish regime has been doing. See, the thing is, when the AK Party came to power, 2002, especially from 2003 when Erdoğan became the prime minister, they tried to present themselves as a new thing: liberal Islamism. Liberal Islamism – in other words, a new model of Islamic government: "We're not like Saudi Arabia, we're not like those [?] people in Iran" – lots of people in the AK Party were kind of influenced by Iran, that's another issue – "we're a type of Islam which is going to allow personal freedoms", which is completely economically neoliberal, which is pro-Western and which is not a threat to any kind of Western–
13:46 And at the beginning they said, "We're not even going to remove the ban on the hijab", which previous Kemalist regimes had had. And in 2004 – yes, I'm just coming to an end here – in 2004 George Bush went over there, made a big speech at the Bosphorus Bridge, in which he patted him on the head and gave official American approval to this new thing of liberal Islam.
14:18 Well, this is all over, and especially demonstrated by the Gezi Park movement in 2013, which mobilised much bigger masses, incidentally, than the counter-offensive to the coup has just mobilised. This liberal Islam has collapsed. What we have now is an authoritarian, increasingly religious Islam. And the people who have opposed that – OK, I suppose people have been reading in the papers, people have been talking a lot about this guy Gülen and his organisation Hizmet and their supporters, and they of course, they are Islamic, but what they call post-Sufi Islam, and they have a more secular attitude towards the state. Other people say it's not them, it's just old-fashioned secularists from the old regime.
15:15 Those are the people who carried it out. In the end it doesn't much matter, in my view, because if you read their statement you can see – whether they come from the Gülenist or Kemalist [?] thing, it doesn't matter – what they're really about is attacking, in their statement they attack the lack of division of powers. In other words, they're saying the presidency, the AK Party is controlling everything: the police, the judges, everything. It's becoming like a corporate, corporate state of a quasi kind of fascist kind.
15:53 I don't want to say that this movement is fascist, because, you know, fascism– very specific, Germany, and they get into debates what is fascism and so on, but this has some parallels with fascism in my view, and the reaction from– remobilisation of sections of the poor, especially the poorest of the poor, the informal sectors, around nationalist kind of themes; the mobilisation of sections of the petty bourgeoisie, sections of the poor, around a completely authoritarian, reactionary project.
16:25 OK, last word. This is bad news, and although nobody could support the coup, what's going to come out of it is very bad news for everybody. For example, there's no question that they're going to pass the death penalty, to be applied to people who are involved in that coup. By the way, the definition of terrorism which the AK Party uses is very broad. I would be very surprised if the death penalty isn't used against people from the PKK – maybe not now, but at some point – against leaders of the HDP. I'd be very surprised if the HDP is not banned, and for certain a lot of its leaders will be put on trial under terrorism charges.
17:27 So this thing is going very far [?]. Obviously we'll talk about it later: we need to build up and redouble our solidarity efforts for those suffering this repression. Right, thank [you].
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