The patron of our people’s misery is the capitalist class and its fascist regime that seizes and exploits cheap refugee labor. The working class and laboring people must never be a partner in organized fascist aggression, and the mass base of fascism must not become complicit in racist lynchings.
On the night of June 30, lynch mobs set off in Melikgazi, Kayseri, following allegations of abuse against a 6-year-old child. Within the next few days, a wave of racist lynching spread across several cities. The incidents, which began with the pretext of child abuse and male violence, were transformed into open hostility towards immigrants and refugees by fascist racist groups, targeting Syrians. Refugees, as well as their workplaces, homes and vehicles were attacked in Kayseri, Reyhanlı (Hatay), Bursa, Kilis, Adana, Antep, ?zmir and some parts of Istanbul. In the Serik district of Antalya, a 17-year-old Syrian refugee worker named Ahmet Handan el–Naif was murdered in the streets.
In the days leading up to the racist lynch mobs, just before June 20 World Refugee Day in Antep, more than 40 institutions, including professional chambers and employer organizations affiliated with the TMMOB (DEFINE), denounced Syrian immigrants and refugees as supposedly dagerous, rendering them them target of attacks. On the occasion of World Refugee Day, the Damascus regime exposed the policies developed by the colonialist Turkish bourgeois state regarding Syrian immigrants and refugees at the UN General Assembly. As it was publicly recognized that the Turkish state hostility towards immigrants and refugees had reached a new treshold, the lynchings broke out in Kayseri.
These escalating racist actions against immigrants cannot be seen as a public reaction to an abuse incident, or a simple nationalist reaction. The situation needs to be viewed from the lessons of history and the current policy agenda of the colonial state. When viewed against a historical and current background that includes horrific crimes such as the Armenian, Pontic, and Assyrian genocides, it should be evaluated as an ethnic cleansing violence by Turkish racist fascist movements. The movement, which is being popularized with the racist slogan “How happy is the one who says I am a Turk” (Turkish: Ne mutlu Türküm diyene, slogan coined by M. Kemal Atatürk), aims to ethnically cleanse and forcibly deport Syrian immigrants.
The colonialist Turkish bourgeois state tore Syrians away from their homeland with its neo-Ottoman expansionist war policies. It became a direct party to the civil war. It turned Syria’s demographics upside down. It plundered the under– and aboveground resources of the Syrian people. It supported political Islamist organizations, including Daesh. It established armies from political Islamist gangs. It occupied the cities of Afrin, Girê Spî and Serêkaniyê in Rojava. Millions of Syrians from Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, Circassian and other nations were forced to migrate to Turkey due to this colonialist war. The Turkish bourgeois state, which has turned millions of Syrians into cheap labor for the collaborator colonialist Turkish capital, is now trying to displace Syrian migrants and refugees once again through a civil fascist movement.
Under the active threat of of racist progroms, many Syrian immigrants and refugees are being pressured into going back. This widespread racist movement— this is important to note— is not born out of spontaneous development.
It is very clear that Syrian immigrants and refugees are being frightened by racist pogroms and forced to migrate in the opposite direction. The racist lynching movement that has spread to different cities is not developing spontaneously. The state’s counter-guerrilla apparatus is organizing this movement. New fascist parties and movements such as the Victory Party are playing a leading role in organizing refugee pogroms. As in the previous attacks in Sakarya, Izmir Torbalı, and Ankara Altında?, this racist lynching movement is fed by hostility towards immigrants and refugees. It is being organized as a fascist aggression that includes all the legal and illegal apparatus of the fascist regime, from the governor to the police, from the judiciary to the gang members.
The person responsible for the abuse must be tried, and our people must give the necessary response. However, the crime committed by one person cannot be attributed to a national community or a refugee group. It is not the refugees who make children and women the subjects of abuse, but the fascist regime with its policies that do not prevent femicides and continue male violence and abuse with the shield of impunity. This male-dominated fascist regime is also responsible for the abuse in Kayseri!
Turkish racist fascist movements and groups use child abuse as a pretext for hostility towards Syrian immigrants and refugees. They are launching pogroms with the accumulated racist resentment. Old and new fascist movements that are on a spear hunt against Syrian immigrants are infecting all our working and poor people with this hysterical Turkish chauvinism poison. Those who seek political fortune with fascist racism are diverting the target of the social anger of our working people who are in poverty. They are demonizing immigrants and refugees by turning them into subjects of deep poverty and all kinds of evil. They are targeting them as enemies. The reason for the misery of our people is the capital class and its fascist regime that seizes cheap and worthless refugee labor. Our working class and working people should never be a party to this organized fascist aggression, and the mass base of fascism should not become an accomplice to racist lynchings.
The Syrian immigrants and refugees who are exploited by the same capital at the cheapest price and oppressed by the same fascist palace junta are our class brothers. Those who ignite and grow this fire of racism as the apparatus of the colonial state, those who prepare the pogrom and the fascist focus and masses who join it are our enemies. Those who fan the flames of hostility towards immigrants and refugees, from the Victory Party to the İYİP, from the MHP to the CHP, and who make the oppressed both the target of racist hatred and the perpetrators of racist lynching attacks by purifying them on a racist basis are the targets of our revolutionary struggle. Our stance must be clear against the escalating Turkish racist lynchings and pogroms against Syrian immigrants and refugees prepared by the hypocritical immigration and refugee policy of the fascist palace regime.
Our working people should condemn pogroms but never be satisfied with this. Our Kurdish people, who have suffered countless fascist lynching attacks, our Alevi people who have experienced the Maraş, Çorum, Malatya, Sivas and Gazi massacres and pogroms, should act with the insight and responsibility to understand the situation and common interests of the oppressed. The most expected situation is that the racist fascist upsurge and coalescence will suddenly change direction tomorrow and target the Kurdish people, Alevis or LGBTI+ people with pogroms. The refugee class should increase its active solidarity with its brothers against the racist lynching attacks targeting immigrants and refugees. It should organize a practice of resistance that raises the flag of the revolutionary unity of the oppressed.
It is not enough to simply state a stance against hostility towards immigrants and refugees. We can only stop this fascist lynching movement with an organized force and push it back with the united struggle of the people. In this context, the weak relationship of our labor left movement with immigrants and refugees on the oppressed and exploited class grounds is a problem in itself. Our labor left movement should not engage in discourse and action that will make the slightest concessions to Turkish racism on this issue. Any nationalist legitimization and rationalization that allows Turkish chauvinism strengthens the racist fascist movement. Moreover, labor left divisions that lean towards such ideas are swept away to a national socialist position. Describing the labor left movement that relates to immigrants and refugees in the position of being oppressed as immigrant romanticism is not a left-socialist attitude, but crude chauvinism. For example, the labor left attitude that supports the cause of our labor and intellectual people who were burned in Madımak on July 2 can withhold the same approach from Syrian immigrants and refugees. It can avoid standing by the oppressed immigrants and refugees with a clear stance. This is the real danger.
While opposing the policies of the fascist palace regime AKP-MHP, the attitude of Turkish social chauvinism, which makes immigrants a problem and a target, only provides legitimacy to Turkish racism and new fascist movements such as the Victory Party. It strengthens the intellectual and political hegemony of new fascist movements. If our working-class left movement is not discriminatory and racist, it should be able to look at the racist attacks targeting oppressed immigrants from the same perspective and show the anti-fascist struggle sequence.
The existence of defenseless immigrants and refugees is under high threat from new fascist centers and paramilitary forces. Pogroms organized with racist resentment have reached a level that targets the right to life of immigrants and refugees. Fascist pogrom attempts that have emerged in different cities show the urgency of political intervention in the situation. It calls for an anti-fascist duty to our entire labor left movement. Organizing self-defense against the new civil fascist movement and centers with a perspective that centers and observes the revolutionary unity of the oppressed is the most critical revolutionary task of the day. At this moment in history, the entire labor left movement is facing a historical test. It is inevitable to form lines and fronts against racism and the new fascist movement. And it has imposed itself in the ‘moment’. There is no middle ground for the labor left movement. It is time to organize the united general political resistance and self-defense positions of our people against the racist lynching movement. It is the task of the day to organize the people’s militia against racist attacks and pogroms. Fascist pogroms can only be stopped with self-defense tools.
*Editorial article of the 174th issue of the ATILIM newspaper, Voice of the Working Class and the Oppressed, dated July 5.