The Republic of Turkey —founded on the basis of one nation, one religion, one creed—has established a structure based on Turkish, Muslim and Sunni elements and imposed it on our peoples. The Kurdish nation, whose national existence was denied under the Kemalist republican order that enforced assimilation of nation, religion and sect, was colonized and all its national rights and freedoms usurped. Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians living in the lands of Turkey and Northern Kurdistan were reduced to small minorities in the process of post-genocidal ethnic exchange and due to systematic migration policies.
The Republic of Turkey, founded under the leadership of the Kemalist bourgeoisie, is entering its centenary.
Its foundation was declared on 29 October 1923 by Mustafa Kemal in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. It is the political product of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and its state tradition– a continuation of its disintegrating structure, renewed in the form of a nation state. In this context, the transition from the imperial to the republican state marks a break in continuity.
M. Kemal is the personality who untied the knots, amidst the transition of one form of state to the other, and reconnected them. He undertook the founding of the Republic on behalf of a weak, yet developing Turkish bourgeoisie. Thus, he rose to the position of founding father of the new Turkish bourgeois state, becoming the historical political figure who built and institutionalized a bourgeois republic.
A former Ottoman imperial officer and director of the Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (ITC; Committee of Union and Progress), M. Kemal’s political personality was shaped by the political school of the ITC. He played a key role in the formation of the Turkish national liberation movement with his military and political abilities, and almost naturally, he took on command of the Turkish national liberation movement.
M. Kemal managed to gather the resistance forces against the imperialist occupation; in their various forms of emergence under the leadership of the Turkish national bourgeoisie. In a first step, he established the Karakol organization of his own, around which he gathered the Kuvayi Milliye force, consisting of a number of Ottoman soldiers, as well as the dispersed forces of the ITC and Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa. Later on, Topal Osman, İpsiz Recep and others joined. Step by step, he seized control over the gangsters of the country, the very perpetrators of the Armenian and Greek genocides, backing the power of the Anatolian and Rumelia Defense of Law Society organizations. The Kuvayi Milliye movement was led by the Turkish bourgeoisie. Within it, the Kuvayi Seyyare, which emerged as the guerrilla resistance force of the Turkish peasants, and the Green Army, led by Çerkes Ethem, united in the name of the Turkish national liberation movement.
Beyond that, an alliance with the Kurdish movement and its leading forces was formed. All these different components were subjugated to M. Kemal’s leadership. It was because of the Kuvayi Seyyare, Çerkes Ethem, and especially their political alliances with the Kurdish lords, that the Turkish national liberation war was won.
M. Kemal is the sustainer of the political line and tradition of the ITC.
This bourgeois tendency can be summarized as politics of power that works to eliminate its enemies and rivals by using all kinds of methods, in order to achieve its goal alongside its allies.
M. Kemal, who was raised in the political school of the ITC regime, which first made an alliance with the Armenian revolutionary movement only to commit a genocide against the Armenian nation after coming to power, applied these bourgeois politics continuously throughout his life. We can observe this in all moments of the Turkish national liberation war, the establishment of the Republic and the institutionalization of the new bourgeois Turkish state.
The Turkish bourgeois republic came into existence as a hostile republican order against the nations and the national communities, against the peoples, the working class and all the oppressed living within the borders of Turkey and Northern Kurdistan. This established order, which inflicts the heaviest exploitation, destruction and disasters on our people and the oppressed, continues its same brutal practice to this day.
The first thirty years of this century-old republic were ruled by the pure dictatorship of “eternal chief” M. Kemal and İsmet İnönü, his collaborator in national matters.
The Republic has, since its foundation under M. Kemal, remained hostile to the people and completed its century-long life with a row of military coups, open military fascist dictatorships and its parliamentary fascist republic regime. Lack of political freedom stands as a determining factor of the unchanging character of the bourgeois republic. In its last chapter, the century-old bourgeois republic and its fascist regime has taken on a new form under political Islam.
The political Islamist, fascist, autocratic regime continues its hostility towards our people by tightly protecting the monist and colonialist foundations of the Kemalist republic. It aims to preserve all the achievements of the established republican order installed on behalf of the collaborator Turkish bourgeois class, while adding its own political Islamist character to the republican regime. Its policies of stretching the principle of secularism of the Kemalist republic to re-introduce the presence of religion, as well as its efforts to partially change the founding codes of the regime, stand out as a current aspect of the structural crisis of the Republic. This struggle for the established order and the helm is most clearly embodied today as the violent ideo-political struggle between the political Islamist and secular Kemalist bourgeois blocs.
Under the conditions of aligning of the Turkish ruling classes into two political blocks, the secular/anti-secular political mechanics has turned into a tool of bourgeois hegemony. This picture of alignment, which covers our peoples’ radical reckoning with the bourgeois republic and their demand for political freedom, distorts the perspective of our left-wing labor movement regarding the Republic. In this constellation, also from a historical point of view, some sections of our labor left are misaligned on the issue of the gains of the Kemalist bourgeois republic and its values, and are leaning on the legacy of the bourgeois republic. The achievements of the Republic are but the achievements of the ruling classes. The values of the Republic are the ideo-political values of the bourgeoisie. Different republican visions, options and demands on the issue on which the labor left has positioned itself for a long time are crystallizing as a “republican policy”. This issue, which is on the agenda of the movement and Marxist-Leninist communists, must undoubtedly be dealt with at a theoretical and political level. It takes an ideo-political stance against the century-old disaster that are the bourgeois republic and its dictatorial regime to confront the people with the reality of its fascist character, demonstrated by way of qualified propaganda. The bourgeois blocs must be confronted by enhanced versions of their own republican options. The current fascist republic must be liquidated by the historical revolutionary action of the oppressed and propagating a union of peoples republics, which is the expression of the power of our peoples, instead.