On May 13, 2014, there were approximately 800 miners trapped in a coal pit in western Turkey when an explosion led to a fire in the tunnels. According to the latest official reports, at least 301 miners died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Grief has quickly turned to rage as shady links between the mine owners and the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) unravelled, leaving many in Turkey convinced that what happened was more a “mass murder” rather than an accident, a direct result of the crony capitalist relationships that constitute the backbone of the AKP’s so-called economic miracle for the last decade.

It is important to note that Turkey has for long been notorious for its poor labour safety record. In workplace accidents, it is by far the first in Europe and third in the world (along with China and Bangladesh), with 8,5 times more workplace accidents than the EU average. 880 000 accidents happened in Turkey between 2002 and 2013, causing 13 442 deaths in total. Since the AKP’s reign begun in 2002, 219 workplace accidents happened in an average day, claiming four lives and leaving five workers each day unable to work. In 2002, 872 workers in total lost their lives in workplace accidents while in 2013 the number was 1 235, a 40% increase in 11 years.

Mining is by far the most dangerous sector in Turkey: 10,4% of 121 000 miners had an accident at work in 2013. In 2012, the country imported 75% of its energy consumption: 98 693 kiloton of an oil equivalent. Of the remaining 25%, half is provided through lignite (brown) coal production – 15355 kiloton (TUIK 2012). About 40% of Turkey’s total two billion ton lignite coal reserve is in the Soma district where the most recent disaster happened.

For a mining company to function in Turkey, it does not only have to notice the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and receive an affirmative expertise report from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, but also obtain the following 13 permits from various ministries, all of which are under the direct executive authority of the government.

– Mining Permit from the General Directorate for Mining of the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources

– Environmental Effect Clarification Report, Storage Permit, Zoning and Building Permits from the Ministry of Environment and Urban Development

– Permits for Emission, Location Choice, Facility Establishment and Opening from the Ministry of Health

– Permit for the Use of Land from the landowner or the General Directorate for Rural Affairs of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs

Permit for the Use of Explosives from the Interior Ministry

Water License from the Municipality or the General Directorate for State Hydraulic Works of the Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs

Electricity License from the State Electricity Distribution Company.

And this is where the all-so-crucial links between the companies and government officials matter the most. Director of Mining Operations for the Soma Holding Enterprises, which runs the mine in question, is Ramazan Doğru. Mr. Doğru’s wife, Melike Doğru, is currently a member of City Council from the AKP as well as the head of Administrative Affairs at Soma Holding. There have also been reports during the past years that prior to the elections the AKP-held Soma Municipality distributed thousands of coal sacks from Soma Holding (marked “not for sale”) to the poor as thinly-veiled bribes for their votes.

Shortly after his purchase of the mine, Alp Gürkan, the CEO of Soma Holding, was proud to announce that they managed to “drop the cost of coal to $24 per ton from $130 before privatization”. Visiting one of Soma Holding’s many mining pits in the region in July 2013, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Taner Yıldız (AKP) praised the company for establishing “exemplary mining complexes that prioritize the safety of miners”. In an interview on 29 April 2013, Gürkan claimed that all the company’s pits were equipped with rescue chambers where 500 workers could survive up to 20 days thanks to water and food supplies as well as direct air connection channels with the surface.

The latest disaster is a strong indication to the opposite, for the surviving miners said that they have not been through any relevant training or even heard of such rooms and facilities. They also witnessed numerous times that the so-called surprise inspections by the authorities were a sham, prearranged well in advance for the owners to give a quick make-up for the parts that were in an immediate sight. None of the miners have seen inspectors going deeper than a few dozen meters into the mines. Contrary to the claims of the owners and government officials that the “accident” was caused by a faulty power transformer, independent investigators concluded, in no equivocal terms, that it was due to exceptionally high levels of methane, gradually increasing for the past few months. Three major Turkish newspapers reported that government investigators had obtained data from the mine indicating dangerous levels of gas just two days before the disaster.

Most strikingly, an official parliamentary proposal made by the opposition parties in October 2013 to establish a parliamentary commission for investigating the increasing number of workplace accidents in the mines around the Soma district and improving the miners’ working conditions by imposing tougher health and safety regulations was rejected by the AKP members on 29 April 2014, two weeks before the disaster. Considering the proposal yet another “flimsy attempt by the opposition to deadlock the government’s agenda”, MPs from the AKP argued that the safety and working conditions in Turkish mines were superior to many of those in other countries. If needed, it would be “the government that made the best regulations before anyone’s nose even bled.’

In fact, since the very beginning, the AKP government has been holding a distinctly fatalistic discourse in regards to workplace accidents. In various instances, PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the members of his government have claimed that it is “in the nature of mining work” to risk one’s life. Following another mining disaster in May 2010 that caused 30 deaths, while the PM repeated the well-known “risk in the nature of work” argument the then-Minister of Labour found optimism in the fact that the lifeless bodies of miners had remained intact and not blown into pieces. In Minister’s own words, they had at least “died beautifully“. There has been no resignation in the parts of ministers of Energy or Labour, let alone any more senior figures in the AKP government. The party spokespersons keep blaming the critics for opportunism and cold-bloodedness since they “accuse the government for a disaster that it had no responsibility in or effect on”.

To add insult to injury, a few days after the Soma disaster the prime minister, with a straight face and no sign of irony, drew parallels with the 19th century Britain to declare: “In a slide in 1862, 204 people died, in 1866, 361 people died, and in an explosion in England in 1894, 290 died. So this is what happens in coal mining. There is no such thing as accident-free work”. Mourning families, however, did not share his fatalism and protested en masse when Erdoğan came to visit them in Soma, only to get kicked by one of his aides and even slapped by Erdoğan himself if they happened to be in his arm’s reach.

The miners’ unions and many other civil society organizations also refuse to share the government’s fatalism and instead consider the increasing number of workplace accidents in the mining industry as a direct outcome of the policy of privatization, subcontracting and deunionization. Thanks to their shady and lucrative deals with the government, these companies act with total impunity as long as they fulfil their production quotas and provide low-cost coal to the State Coal Enterprises. They employ thousands of unregistered miners and child workers, increase working hours, and totally disregard health and safety regulations to cut the production costs.

As trade union density has dropped to its lowest level in Turkish history due to the government’s relentless policy of deunionization, miners, like workers in other sectors, have also witnessed a considerable meltdown in their rights and freedoms for the last decade, finding themselves increasingly more helpless to fight against the exploitative working conditions. While the unionization rate in OECD and the EU stands at 17.5% and 23% respectively, it has dropped from 9.5% in 2002 to 5.9% in 2011 in Turkey, placing the country decisively to the bottom of both lists. Moreover, this figure falls as low as 3.5% in the private sector where most of the Turkish miners are employed.

For these reasons, trade unions in Turkey, including the biggest trade union confederations: Confederation of Revolutionary Workers Unions (DISK), Confederation of Public Sector Workers Unions (KESK), Union of Engineers and Architects (TMMOB), and Medical Doctors Union (TTB) consider what happened on 13 May 2014 not as an accident but a “mass murder”, committed by not only the companies and sub-contractors in question but also the government.

Recently this principle of governance in Turkey has been dubbed as a policy of “merciless growth”, whereby human life, environment, public space, history and everything else are sacrificed for the absolute fetish of economic growth. A growth that is largely driven by the already overheating housing and construction sectors, which remain firmly in the hands of a limited number of business moguls who are in intimate terms with the government, and inflicts irreparable damages to the historical, cultural, societal and environmental riches of the country. Soma Holding is indeed one of these actors. It was thanks to the AKP’s 2005 privatization law that the company, millions of dollars in debt at the time, raised from its ashes and took over various state-owned mining pits in the Soma region, winning tenders worth €25bn and becoming the 231st biggest company in Turkey in just five years. As Yaşar Adanalı, an Istanbul-based researcher of urban development, has put it:

“The capital accumulated by the exploitative working conditions is highly visible in the city, as it fuels the erection of many speculative real estate projects, such as the Spine Tower of Soma Corporation. The Spine Tower in Maslak, the major business district in Istanbul, is the tallest skyscraper in town and one of the most expensive, with its $10.000 price tag per square metre. This project is being promoted, again ironically, as being “the most safe high-rise project in Turkey” due to the quality of its construction. “Safety” and “quality” is withheld from the mine’s working conditions as we all know. After the Soma Massacre, people in Istanbul had organised various protests in front of the Spine Tower Project, stating that “the blood of the workers is dripping from the tower.””

Such a merciless pursue for growth also fails to trickle down enough to increase the living standards of its population. Case in point: according to the latest OECD data, Turkey has the third highest level of income inequality and relative poverty among the member states. With 50% of the families with children struggling to afford food, it remains at the very bottom of the list. Despite the government boasting about its great leap forward for the “New Turkey” that is supposed to be one of the ten largest economies in the world, these figures are steadily getting worse since 2008.

In the meantime, however, the prime minister keeps unveiling his so-called “crazy projects” (çılgın proje) one by one – including the world’s largest airport and the third bridge over Bosporus to be built in northern part of Istanbul, as well as an artificial channel that would run parallel to the strait and connect the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara. All but the staunchest supporters of the government agree that these projects are indeed crazy: Aside from being utterly unfeasible in financial terms, urban planners and environmental engineers warn that they would seriously harm the ecological and economic sustainability of Istanbul and its surrounding regions. While the proposed channel would most probably further decrease the already low oxygen level in the Marmara Sea, turning its bottom level eventually anoxic and, thus, causing the whole Istanbul smell like rotten egg due to the hydrogen sulphide release, the airport and bridge projects that are already underway will destroy most of the green areas and wetlands in the north that constitute the lifeblood for this giant city of about 15 million residents.

It was precisely these inhumane aspects of Turkey’s crony capitalism and a fetish of growth under the AKP government that made millions take the streets in last year’s Gezi protests. As the protestors repeatedly put it, they have not risen to save just “a bunch of trees” in Istanbul’s Gezi Park but to put a stop to the merciless way in which the government has been sacrificing their lives and livelihoods in the service of economic growth. Thus, the mass murder in Soma must be seen only as the latest crime committed by this predominant governmentality in Turkey that is characterized mainly by crony capitalism and an insatiable fetish for growth. One has to pass through the issues that are related to the so-called Islamisation of society or secular vs. conservative divide in Turkey in order to be able to see the underlying murderous regime that the AKP really is.

Article image: Angela / Pixabay

Julkaisu Mass Murder in Soma Mine: Crony Capitalism and Fetish of Growth in Turkey ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

Berkin weighted just 16 kilos when Turkey’s vampiric government was finally done with sucking the life out of him. Berkin’s is the 8th life this murderous beast has claimed since the beginning of Gezi Protests on 30 May 2013, along with the thousands of injured protestors who have been scarred for life.

In a despicable attempt to save their skin as well as that of their masters, police officers and mainstream Turkish media showed a few packs of bubble gum in Berkin’s tiny pockets as “evidence”. In a hastily prepared report, they blatantly lied that those were “explosive components found on Berkin’s body at the time he was brought to the hospital.”

Contrary to widespread international criticism and reports condemning them as “the brutal denial of the right to peaceful assembly in Turkey”, Turkish PM Erdogan praised abominable acts by the riot police as “epic” and proudly admitted that he personally gave the order. This was the same PM who accused his Israeli counterpart of “knowing very well how to kill Palestinian children” only a few years ago.

Make no mistake though. There has been no change in the Turkish government’s stance since then. If possible, it got even worse. Thousands more have been taken into custody, arrested or lost their jobs for taking part in the protests. Government has tightened its grip over media, internet and judiciary to the point of suffocation, working very hard to leave no space for civil society and social criticisms to exist against its increasingly authoritarian and corrupted rule. Those who gathered around Turkey to remember Berkin are still beaten, gassed and arrested at this very moment.

As thousands march in Istanbul for Berkin’s funeral, a silent memorial and protest event was held also in Helsinki on March 11th to remember those who have suffered and continue to suffer under Turkey’s increasingly oppressive and corrupted regime. As a gesture to honor Berkin’s memory, protestors left candles and bread on the pavement opposite the Turkish Embassy on Puistokatu.

Considered in tandem with the immense loss of legitimacy on the government’s part following the widespread corruption scandals that reach all the way to the top, incontrovertible contrast between the pure innocence surrounding Berkin’s short life and the wicked evilness of those who ended it brings to mind maybe the oldest question in the history of liberal thinking: when is it acceptable to rebel against the sovereigns?

As the desperate act of self-immolation by Mohamed Bouazizi crystalized the dark pit many Tunisians found themselves in and kindled the light of a legitimate, democratic uprising against Ben Ali’s tyrannical regime, Berkin’s murder has the potential to become a deeply saddening yet possibly hopeful sign that Turkey has finally reached the point of no return, where the innocence has been lost and the only way to regain it is plunging deeper into the abyss. Built on the daring experiences of Summer 2013, many around the country have once again united in their struggle to call the government to account for its deeds, not least for the murder of a child who ran to the bakery for a loaf of bread.

Article image: congerdesign / Pixabay

Julkaisu Berkin Elvan can become Turkey’s Mohamed Bouazizi ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

From friends to foes

Since the beginning of the uprisings in Syria in March 2011, Turkey’s relationship with its southern neighbour has been deteriorating with an unprecedented pace. Turkish government’s initial “friendly” advice for Damascus to accelerate the democratization process in order to avoid further violent clashes quickly turned into a direct call for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down in June 2011. Besides suspending all its bilateral agreements with Syria, Turkey has taken initiatives in hosting the Syrian National Council (SNC) in Istanbul and Free Syrian Army (FSA) in its southern province Hatay. Although it is difficult to speculate on Ankara’s level of involvement with the armed wing of the Syrian opposition, increasing number of journalistic analyses explicitly indicate that Turkish government is actively involved in setting up a ‘nerve centre with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military and communications aid to Syria’s rebels from a city near the border’.

This had led, for the last year or so, Damascus to consider its northern neighbour as openly hostile. It is also regarded as the main reason why a Turkish military jet was shut down after violating Syrian airspace in June 2012. Referring to these events in a recent interview, President al-Assad accused Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of being “two-faced” and responsible for making Turkey a party to Syria’s bloodshed. Erdogan has also been making several, equally harsh statements about his Syrian counterpart; accusing al-Assad of dishonesty, cowardice, and attempted genocide. Most recently in early August 2012, he even questioned whether al-Assad was ‘really a Muslim‘.

No longer “brothers”

So what happened? This may sound like a rather naïve question but any observer of the Turkish-Syrian relationship would be justified, at least to some degree, to ask what exactly has led these two neighbours to clutch each other’s throats again. It is a surprise because while the Western countries to a large extend spurned the Baath Regime in Syria over the past decade, Erdogan was busy cultivating close economic and socio-cultural ties with al-Assad since the day his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in November 2002. Until just a couple of years ago, Erdogan and al-Assad used to address each other as “brothers” and were even photographed spending their family holiday together in August 2008. As “brothers”, could they not somehow come up with a more diplomatically correct solution to the situation, rather than sinking down to this absolute bottom where one brother, Turkey, harbours and actively supports the armed opposition in its own territory while the other one, Syria, uses the “enemy of its enemy“, i.e. armed Kurdish separatist movements, asa buffer zone on the south of the border? [1]

For the most part of the 20th century, bilateral relations between the neighbours were considered as ‘universally poor and often tense right from the founding of the Turkish Republic’ (Fuller 2008, 93). Besides having disputes over Hatay/Alexandretta territory and water sources regarding Euphrates and Tigris rivers where Turkey constructed several dams during 1990s, the countries came to the brink of war as recently as 1998 when Turkey gathered its army at the southern border and gave Hafez al-Assad a blunt ultimatum, telling him to cease support for the separatist Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) and expel its leader, Abdullah Öcalan (Altunisik, 2004, 363-78). Lastly Turkey’s rapprochement with Israel in the late 1990s led to the Syrian perception that the alliance was directed against it, threatening the latter of being sandwiched between two unfriendly states.

AKP skilfully managed to overturn this traditional Turkish policy of ‘conscious alienation and controlled tension’ toward Syria by taking a proactive stance in building economic and cultural relations between the countries (Aras, 2005). In line with the policy framework put forward by the Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in his book Strategic Depth, Turkey started to promote its cultural, economic, and political influence further in the Middle East in order to reach “zero problems with neighbours“, whatever their past or current misdeeds. This process kick-started with Erdogan’s groundbreaking visit to Damascus in December 2004 where a free trade agreement was signed between Ankara and Damascus which eventually tripled the volume of bilateral trade in five years from $752 million in 2004 to $2.27 billion in 2010.

The following year, as an explicit gesture of good will, Turkey began clearing ‘the nearly 450-mile long, 1500-foot wide minefield between the two countries (planted in 1952 at the height of the Cold War)’. Turkey also took initiative to act as a mediator for indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria over the tangled issue of the Golan Heights in 2008 (though this Turkish initiative collapsed soon after the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2009). And finally in September 2009, Davutoglu and his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem signed an agreement in Istanbul allowing for a visa-free passage between the two countries which increased the cross border relations immensely.

New-Ottomanism disintegrating

This new foreign policy of the AKP government (dubbed as “Neo-Ottomanism”), which aims to cultivate close political and economic relations with predominantly Muslim countries by utilizing Turkey’s shared cultural and historical background, seems to have been disintegrated at the start of the so-called Arab Spring. At these times of immense change and future oriented political imagination, the AKP government’s insistence on rekindling the “glorious” Ottoman past and rebuilding the future on its blueprints does not resonate well in the region. It seems to have even backfired in Syria.

As Bassam Haddad emphasizes, it raises deep suspicions about Turkish intentions even among the Syrian insurgents when, for instance, Erdogan states: ‘They ask me why I care about Syria so much. My answer is simple. It is that we are the remnants of the Ottoman states, the descendants of the Seljuks, and the descendants of the Ottomans.’ There are suspicions of ‘Turkish ambitions to control the region as a continuation of the Ottoman trend‘. This is particularly why, Haddad points out, the current Turkish policy vis-à-vis the Syrian civil war is actually hurting the cause of the Syrian opposition: ‘Those rebel groups who stand too close to Turkey are losing their support back home because the opposition appears to be losing its independence’ and shaping its strategy in conformity with the current Turkish priorities.

This is especially significant in the case of the Kurdish opposition groups who suspect that being financially and politically supported by the AKP government, the current SNC based in Turkey will and cannot fulfil Kurdish demands in Syria. As Aron Lund observes in his detailed analysis on Syrian opposition, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), ‘the single most important organization in Syrian Kurdistan […] disparages the SNC as “the Istanbul council”, portraying it as a Turkish puppet which ignores the plight of Syrian Kurds’. PYD leader Saleh Muslim Mohammed even argues that ‘the regime that they [SNC] are trying to force upon Syria with the help of Erdogan has absolutely no Kurdish presence‘.

This is partially related to the existential links the PYD has with the armed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, with which Turkish army has been fighting a protracted conflict since 1984 [2]. In other words, the PYD, by its very nature, is inclined to oppose any actor who is embraced by the Turkish state. Through its support for the SNC, which represents at best 60 percent of the Syrian opposition, the AKP government is in fact damaging the Syrian opposition and driving a potentially insurmountable wedge between its various components. It is therefore plausible to argue that it is this deep distrust towards the Turkish-backed opposition which has recently led the PYD to cut a dealwith President Assad which ‘handed the PYD a control of key areas in the northeast‘ where the party has already opened up Kurdish cultural centres and organised local elections.

Sectarian dynamics

Then there is the “sectarian” dimension of the AKP government’s policy toward the Syrian crisis. Supporting exclusively the Sunni rebels and routinely denouncing the Assad government as the “Alawite minority regime”, Erdogan’s party has placed itself ‘not only against the Baath regime but also against the Alawites‘. There is actually an underlying domestic political concern related to the Turkish equivalents of the Arab/Syrian Alawites, Alevis, which partially explains the AKP’s sectarian stance. Estimated to make up to a fifth of the population, Turkish Alevis, like the Alawites, are an offshoot of Shia Islam and politically close to the secular Kemalist ideology (Ciddi, 2009).

Despite their numbers, the Alevi religious identity does not officially exist in Turkey. Demands for their temples (“cem houses”) to be legally recognised by the State are ignored, forcing them to remain as “cultural centres”. What is noteworthy, however, is the way in which the ruling Sunni conservatives do not refrain from singling Alevis out as “the other” or even as non-Muslims, as Erdogan recently remarked: “Alevis are an extremely fractured bunch; there are those who claim that Alevis are Muslims and others who say they are not. There are even atheists among them. If we are Muslims, our temple ought to be one and the same.”

The fact that the leader of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), happens to be an Alevi only escalates this sectarian tension, enabling the AKP leaders to suggest that the opposition’s critical stance against the government’s interventionist policy in Syria had to do with its leader’s Alevi creed. It seems so that playing on the prejudices of the Sunni majority in Turkey and Syria, the AKP government has found its “other” in the name Alevi or Alawite (there is no linguistic difference between the two in Turkish), into which the party leaders liberally throw whomever they consider as their “opponents” – be it the Baath regime in Syria, religious minority in Turkey, or the opposition party.

Notes

[1] Such a U-turn is, of course, not unprecedented for Erdogan. Just a few months before calling for Gaddafi to step down and lending his cooperation to NATO intervention to Libya, Erdogan had received the annual Al-Gadhafi International Prize for Human Rights and proclaimed that an international intervention in Libya would be “unthinkable” and “absurd,” attributing Western concern about the deteriorating situation there to “calculations” over oil, and alleging that the “real plan” being advanced is actually an old-fashioned “imperial carve-up.”

[2] As a part of the understanding between Ankara and Damascus during the rapprochement period, Syrian state used to keep a close eye on Kurdish armed groups close to Turkish border until Erdogan’s government took a clear anti-Assad stance. Especially since the beginning of 2012, PKK increased the scope and scale of its violent attacks in Turkey. This recent emergence of a de-facto Kurdish-controlled region friendly to its main domestic foe, i.e. PKK, indicates that ‘Turkey’s worst nightmares are beginning to come true in Syria.’

References

Altunisik, M.B. 2004. “Turkey’s Middle East Challenges: Towards a New Beginning?” in Turkish Foreign Policy in Post-Cold War Era. Idris Bal (ed.). Brown Walker: Florida.

Ciddi, Sinan. 2009. Kemalism in Turkish Politics: The Republican People’s Party, Secularism and Nationalism. London: Routledge.

Fuller, Graham E. 2008. The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World. Washington D.C.: United States Institute of Peace.

Julkaisu Sectarian dimensions of Turkey’s involvement in Syria ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.