Anti-NATO international summit held in Istanbul

 12punto.com.tr   

Mustafa BÜYÜKSİPAHİ

The "Anti-NATO Summit," announced at the call of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), was held today (Saturday, July 4) at the Nâzım Hikmet Cultural Center in Kadıköy, Istanbul. Declaring July 4-12 as the "Anti-NATO Week" in opposition to the official NATO summit to be held in Ankara later that week, the TKP brought together world communists and anti-war organizations in Istanbul as the first major step of the marches and events to be organized in various provinces.

The summit was attended by representatives of communist and workers' parties from NATO member countries, as well as the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Democratic Youth. In their speeches, communists from Austria, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal discussed NATO's anti-people policies in their own countries, current topics of the anti-imperialist struggle, and how to strengthen the joint struggle against NATO, sharing their experiences. This international meeting served as a collective expression of an uncompromising stance against NATO's new plans.

The opening speech of the summit was delivered by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), Kemal Okuyan. 

The speech delivered by Okuyan at the summit was as follows:

"Dear friends,

Today, we have our comrades and friends from abroad among us. We would have liked to host them under different conditions. A socialist Turkey, cleansed of exploitation, inequalities, and injustices, will undoubtedly be a beautiful country worth living in and loving. And in that country, neither foreign bases, nor American soldiers, nor NATO will be able to survive.

In recent years, while continuing our struggle against NATO, we have added the slogan "NATO out of Turkey" to our demand that "Turkey should leave NATO." These two demands are a whole and actually express the reality much better. NATO is everywhere in Turkey. In its politics, economy, and culture. Behind political assassinations, in the planning of coups, in psychological warfare, and in information channels that pump lies.

Those who brought our country into this ominous crime machine, this imperialist organization, in 1952, acted just like the French ruling classes who collaborated with occupying forces against their own laborers in 1871, and left our people alone with NATO aggression.

The reason for this is clear.

The Turkish bourgeoisie took refuge under the imperialist umbrella to protect its own sovereignty and provide an armor of immunity to the existing social system, and also saw NATO membership as an opportunity to provide new economic-political possibilities.

While taking this step, they used the lie that "the Soviet Union is threatening us, help us."

The Soviet Union and the Republic of Turkey were founded in the same period as two countries with different social systems, ideologies, and class characters. Starting with Lenin, the Soviet administration, in addition to establishing good relations with the Ankara government, which disrupted the post-war plans of British imperialism, provided it with weapons and gold support, and politically supported Turkey's struggle for independence.

Later, the bourgeoisie consolidated its power in Turkey and sought different foreign policy paths, but the USSR maintained an extremely cautious policy towards Turkey until its dissolution in 1991. Even after Turkey became a NATO member, it helped establish large industrial facilities so that the country could distance itself, even slightly, from imperialist countries. It took care not to interfere in the country's internal politics and preferred not to give reactions that would disrupt relations during periods of fascist coups. This caution sometimes reached levels that drew the reaction of Turkish revolutionaries.

The truth was that the USSR never threatened Turkey militarily, nor did it pursue a radical transformation in the country. In other words, there was never a Soviet threat towards Turkey.

The demands for a "base in the Straits" conveyed to Turkish officials by Molotov at the end of the Second World War, and the demand for the transfer of two cities in the East, which were left to Turkey in 1921, to the Soviets, were never made official, and were the product of a security concern stemming from the hot environment of the Second World War and the events experienced during the war. It is a fact that no one can deny today that throughout the war, Turkish governments took an anti-Soviet stance, especially between 1939-1944, turned a blind eye to Nazi propaganda, allowed the passage of German auxiliary warships and ammunition through the Straits, sold the chromium necessary for tank and aircraft production to Germany, and nationalist circles incited Turkish-speaking peoples living in the USSR against the Soviet administration. The CHP government in Turkey (with the exception of a few names who valued friendship with the USSR) followed in the footsteps of the British bourgeoisie, which tried every way to provoke Germany against the Soviets before the war, and saw the Nazi armies' attack on the USSR as a great opportunity.

In 1952, when Turkey became a member of NATO, there was no threat of real communism in the country either. The TKP, which had been declared illegal, was struggling under very difficult conditions, the working class could not exert social weight politically and organizationally, and socialist ideology could not gain widespread sociality.

However, as if reading the future, the bourgeoisie decided to anchor to the Atlantic alliance, knowing that anti-people policies and a capital accumulation model based on intense exploitation would have serious social consequences.

What they feared happened in the 1960s. With the mobilization of the working class and student youth in Turkey and their exertion of political-ideological weight, NATO's counter-revolutionary reflexes were immediately activated. Behind the two military coups, dozens of massacres, and murders squeezed between 1970-1980, there was a secret NATO that provided intelligence and support to both official violence apparatuses and civilian fascist-civilian religious movements.

Even today, the roots of all colors of bourgeois politics in Turkey being pro-NATO lie in those bloody years. The current order in Turkey does not feel comfortable without NATO.

It is not surprising in this sense that the Turkish bourgeoisie fell into a paranoia of becoming insignificant for a while after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The disappearance of the foundations of the "Soviet threat" fairy tale and the fact that bourgeois Russia did not recognize any limits in trying to curry favor with the US and other imperialist countries in the 1990s created a concern in Turkey that "our geostrategic importance is decreasing." This concern also pointed to a class blindness that could not realize the fact that there would be no imperialist world without contradictions, competition, and war.

Turkey supported all of the interventions of US imperialism and NATO towards the gaps created by the dissolution of the USSR. Then, with the AKP government in 2002, this support became more systematic and daring. So much so that Tayyip Erdoğan was declared the Co-Chair of the Greater Middle East Project. The Turkish bourgeoisie had overcome the trauma of insignificance and was in pursuit of new missions.

It soon became clear that these missions would not be limited to playing auxiliary roles in US aggression. Turkish capitalism had developed at great speed, serious breakthroughs had been made in industrialization and infrastructure, and the country's population had become predominantly urbanized. Capital was in pursuit of new markets and investment areas. The Communist Party of Turkey emphasized that after the first few years of the AKP government, Neo-Ottomanism was maturing as a strategy as a synthesis of the Turkish bourgeoisie's desire for expansion and the AKP's ideological tendencies. An assessment that did not make sense when it was first voiced is now accepted by almost everyone.

In this context, the AKP government saw the Arab Spring as a great opportunity and began to market its influence over the Muslim Brotherhood to the US and other imperialist countries. By directly intervening in the civil war in Syria, it tried to prove the compatibility of Neo-Ottomanism with pro-NATOism.

It was inevitable that this strategy would create hesitation among Western imperialist countries, which were experiencing serious contradictions within themselves. There were too many actors who did not want to open a space of this scale to a regional power aiming to resurrect the Ottoman Empire in a new format. The friction between Erdoğan and the US and European imperialists began for this reason. More cautious segments of the Turkish bourgeoisie began to take a stance against Erdoğan's aggressive foreign policy, and the US and EU began to look for ways to create a more docile and traditional political option in Turkey...

Erdoğan improved his relations with Russia to strengthen his hand in negotiations, and even to protect himself. Russia was already Turkey's energy supplier, and there were comprehensive economic relations between the two countries, especially in tourism, construction, and agricultural products. If it is taken into account that Russian intelligence played an important role in the failure of the US-backed coup attempt in 2016, it is easy to see what point the relations between Russia and Turkey have reached.

However, as our party stated at that time, Ankara turning its face to Moscow can only have a temporary character. Erdoğan would use Russia as a trump card in negotiations with the West, and then at an appropriate moment, he would put relations with NATO back at the center.

Since 2023, Turkey has been returning to a NATO-centered policy step by step. There are multiple reasons for this:

1. The Turkish bourgeoisie needs the "political" determination of the US, UK, and Germany to overcome its resource problems.

2. Maintaining the balance policy between NATO and Russia has become impossible for a number of reasons, primarily the developments in Ukraine.

3. It is mandatory for NATO to give the green light and for joint investments to be made in a number of areas so that Turkey's rapidly developing arms industry can increase its share in world markets.

4. The US has scared Turkey by using Greece and Romania in the Black Sea, saying "I have other options." A similar fear has also emerged due to Israel's regional initiatives. Turkey's exclusion from energy investments and routes in the Mediterranean has come to the agenda.

5. The AKP government realized that Turkey could take on important roles on behalf of NATO in the war in Ukraine and decided to take advantage of this opportunity.

6. It has been seen that the US can put into play financial, political, and legal instruments that will put the AKP government in a difficult position.

After all this, the government is preparing to renew its vows with NATO during the summit. This summit will not consist only of shows. At this summit, we will witness the reorganization and strengthening of NATO, which some call "over" with great stupidity, as an attack organization. Those who hope that the attack capability of this bloody organization will decrease due to the existence of deep and increasingly deepening cracks within NATO are mistaken. The Turkish bourgeoisie is preparing to open a space for itself in NATO by taking advantage of these cracks and to take on primary roles in meeting the military needs of the European Union, which is trying to draw a new roadmap. For this reason, they turned Ankara into a giant prison and put makeup on the city. Throughout the summit, Turkish weapons systems will be showcased.

Thus, we will witness a new version of Neo-Ottomanism that will be tried to be implemented under the NATO umbrella and its protection. From the former Soviet Republics to Russia's Muslim peoples, from China's Uyghur region to the Middle East, a Turkish-Kurdish-Arab alliance!

The New Kurdish Peace also falls exactly here.

So, will they succeed?

There is no place for the working class and revolutionary struggle in this model. Yet they will see that a Turkey cleansed of the struggle of the working people and communists is not possible.

There are no cracks within NATO in this model. Yet the contradictions between the US and the EU, and the tensions between EU countries do not disappear; on the contrary, they deepen.

There are no US allies competing with the Turkish bourgeoisie in this model. Yet Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Greece also have a say and a claim in the so-called "Ottoman" geography.

There is no "rival" Iran in this model, which is sometimes underestimated by the Turkish bourgeoisie but should never be underestimated, as in the last war. Yet Iran still has the power to thwart the moves of Turkish capitalism in some points.

Yes, NATO continues to exist and the fight continues; against imperialism, the fight for independence and socialism."