From: ww@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Workers' Party Founded in Turkey
Date: 26 Jan 93 06:53:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:B2XyXB5w165w@nyxfer.uucp:-1870375107:000:4639
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!ww    Jan 25 22:53:00 1993


Subject: Workers' Party Founded in Turkey
From: nyxfer!ww (Workers World Service)


Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit


NEW WORKERS PARTY FOUNDED IN TURKEY

By Bill Doares

Turkey, with 60 million people, is the most populous nation in 
the Middle East. With the only acknowledged U.S. military bases 
in the Middle East on its soil, it is central to the Pentagon's 
strategy for world domination.

Much of the U.S. terror bombing of Iraq in 1991 was launched from
Turkey, and Turkey's long border with the USSR made it a center 
of U.S. intelligence activity. Today, because of its close 
linguistic and cultural ties to the former Soviet republics in 
Central Asia and the Caucasus, Turkey is important to 
Washington's plans to dominate the former USSR.

But Turkey also has a large, exploited working class with a rich 
socialist tradition, and an oppressed Kurdish minority that is 
fighting for self-determination. The workers' movement in Turkey 
has been severely repressed by a succession of U.S.-backed 
military dictatorships, but it has not been crushed.

Last fall, some veterans of the class battles that raged in 
Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s, a number of whom had spent 
years in prison, came together to form a new workers' party, the 
Party for Socialist Turkey (STP). The STP's founders had been in 
several socialist tendencies, both legal and illegal, before the 
1980 military coup. They united on the basis of a shared belief 
in the continuing validity of socialism and the class struggle 
and opposition to the pro-capitalist reforms in the USSR.

The STP has grown rapidly, establishing branches in most of 
Turkey's major industrial centers as well as locals in six 
districts in Istanbul, the largest city. Its newspaper, Iktidar, 
has been banned several times for "inciting class hostility." STP
cadre helped organize May Day demonstrations in defiance of the 
Turkish state as well as protests against the Gulf war and the 
Turkish regime's massacres of the Kurdish people. They also 
played leading roles in a number of labor struggles, including 
the 1991 Zonguldak miners' strike and the occupation of a glass 
factory in Istanbul's Beykoz district to protest layoffs.

On Nov. 28, over 1,000 Communists, workers and students, veterans
and youth, packed the Ortakoy Cultural Center in Istanbul to 
celebrate the STP founding. The hall resounded with chants of 
"Long live revolution and socialism" and "Long live our struggle 
for socialist power." Participants waved red flags bearing the 
party's wheel-and-hammer emblem.

The celebration was held even though 37 STP members, including 
several Central Committee members, had been arrested for putting 
up posters announcing the party's founding. Over 20,000 posters 
were put up in one night as part of the campaign.

Solidarity with Cuba as a fortress of socialism was a major theme
of the celebration, and Jorge Castro Benitez of the international
affairs bureau of the Cuban Communist Party was an honored guest 
speaker. In the weeks before the celebration, the STP gathered 
thousands of petitions protesting the U.S. blockade of Cuba and 
collected $80,000 worth of medicine for the Cuban people.

Other international speakers represented Workers World Party in 
the United States and the Revolutionary Communist Group from 
Britain.

In a stirring opening address, STP chairman Ali Onder Ondes spoke
of the need to continue to struggle for world socialism in the 
face of U.S. imperialism's "new world order." He called for 
solidarity with Cuba, with the Soviet Communists fighting against
capitalist restoration and with the liberation struggle of the 
Kurdish people.

Confident in class struggle

Saluting the many revolutionaries who have given their lives in 
the struggle for socialism in Turkey, he said, "Capitalism 
promises heaven but offers the people only hunger and poverty. 
... Therefore, we are confident that the class struggle and the 
fight for socialist political power will develop again in Turkey 
and in the world. As Marxist-Leninists, we know that the common 
future of humanity is socialism. There can be no other destiny."

 
                               -30-

Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 West 21st
Street, New York, NY 10010; e-mail: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org or
workers@mcimail.com.


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