TURKEY has been hitting the headlines in the international media. First we were given the "good news" about the admission of Turkey in the European Customs Union.
Then the bad news began.
On March 12 mass murderers raided Gaziosmanpasa, a poor district of Istanbul, killing three. The fact that such violence could not have taken place without police's collaboration - there is a police station only a few yards away from the incident - provoked a local community demonstration.
This gave the police an opportunity to start a massacre: demonstrators were fired upon from helicopters and police tanks. Nineteen were killed, hundreds injured.
The protests spread around other poor districts of Istanbul and other big cities. The police violence continued and the death toll rose.
Committees
The state authority in Gaziosmanpasa and other neighbourhoods in action collapsed and was taken over by local anti-fascist committees.
The "liberated zones" were suppressed only after army intervention. The ordeal concluded with the funerals of over 30 people killed by police fire. There remain about 50 people in police custody.
The international media reported these events as "sectarian violence" because the victims of the violence were predominantly Alawis. The whole incident has been falsely retold in terms of the rebellion of an Islamic sect or, even worse, as violence between different sects of Islam.
The truth is quite different.
Traditionally Umraniye Gaziosmanpasa and other Alawi districts have always been leftwing strongholds: no rightwing party could ever win any support among this sector of the urban-poor. The Gaziosmanpasa and Umraniye massacres have nothing to do with religion-motivated sectarian violence - they are fascist attacks on progressive communities.
Fascism is the best organized Turkish special forces aim to seek and destroy Kurdish resistance force within the Turkish state: the two major center-right parties, DYP and ANAP, have strong far-right facTIOnS which call themselves "Ulkucu" - a name associated with the youth wing of the fascist National Movement Party, MHP.
Many key positions within the state are held by fascists, so much that even 70 per cent of all the MPs in Turkey's parliament are of Ulkucu origin; two thirds of the overpopulated Turkish police force consist of the militants, members and supporters of the MHP; the rest are Islamic fanatics and the members of centre-right parties.
Fascist influence in the state forces has always been a phenomenon of Turkish politics, but a large scale "fascisation" process of the state began in full steam only after the military coup in 1980. This process was accelerated with the beginning of the Kurdish guerrilla movement in 1984.
MHP militants provided an excel. lent reservoir of recruitment for the "special forces" - counter-insuramong the police, army, and the special forces.
This machinery is not merely employed for the suppression of the Kurdish revolt, but against any protest from those sectors of society which have been suffering the most from ever worsening living conditions.
"Democratisation' In this very specific sense Turkey has lived through a counter-revolution for the last fifteen years. The liberals of both Europe and Turkey have preferred to see instead a process of "democratisation". This view is based on an illusion that there is a "dualism" between the coalition government and the hardline institutions of the state.
However, while it is no secret that the generals have more say on state affairs than the prime minister, the fact that a "liberal" government has done nothing to change this arrangement and has been massively influenced by these same "hardliners", should raise serious questions about their alleged liberalism.
At issue here is not so much a "dualism" as a mutual sharing of One reason for the liberal illusions is the widespread view that the forces in power in contemporary Turkey are the only alternative to a "fundamentalist" takeover.
The conspiracy theories which have become very popular in Turkish and international media are useless in understanding what happened in Istanbul. There is no mystery to be solved.
What the police tried to do in Istanbul was to repeat what they have been doing in Kurdistan for over a decade. They tried to crush the antifascist strongholds.
Fascism depends on its ability to attack progressive forces. In Turkey these are the Kurdish liberation movement, socialists, the working class, university students and the urban poor.
There has been a dramatic increase in violent attacks on all these sectors of society in recent years by both the civilian fascists and the police. The recent incidents in Istanbul are a particularly bloody continuation of this process.