The Syrian refugee in the presence of the naked king İmamoğlu
Germany – North-Press Agency
Ferhad Hami
The symbolism of incidents of Turkish citizens attacks on the Syrian gatherings in Istanbul during the past weeks and months was represented in the extent of the sheer physical violence that was concealed in the speech of the Syrian opposition parties over the past years, these Syrian parties, which are ideologically entangled with the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have found their misfortune when of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu became the mayor of Istanbul, to incite their anger against the recent incidents, as if this protestation was a kind of an implicit resentment of The Justice and Development Party’s (AK Parti) failure in Turkey’s largest city, depicting it as a humanitarian problem that Syrian refugees have experienced in the Turkish cities for years.
In fact, in order for the scene to be clearer, it’s not right to make deterministic judgments and restrict them within the circle of this hypothesis, which bears an immediate reaction to the condemnation of the pure physical violence in the streets of Istanbul, there is even violence within the language system and discourse in the structure of the authoritarian parties in Turkey which appeared on the opposite side. In which it became clear by the mayor of Istanbul Ekrem İmamoğlu, in defending the hypothesis of the Turkish national superiority, and the purity of Istanbul culture against the other strange, the abnormal and the fugitive, thus according to İmamoğlu’s speech as categorized “Syrian refugees”, thus, it’s the problem of the nation-state system and the discourse of power together in their general scope, and this is the field that deserves to be highlighted.
In fact, it wasn’t expected that İmamoğlu would deviate the format of CHP’s anti-refugee speech since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis, given his party’s clear stance regarding the issue of Syrian refugees, unlike the pragmatic Erdogan’s party (AK Parti), which invests in this paper as a kind of political blackmail, but the ideological and media confusion was tempting the public opinion by portraying İmamoğlu as a democratic knight, riding a horse of love, peace, diversity, tolerance, and the openness to the others, Including his ability to contain the refugees’ issue in a humanitarian manner, in order to remove the veil of darkness which prevails the Turkish political climate by the hands of Erdogan.
Where there was this platform of “false democracy”, as a theater for this dreamy democratic test in Istanbul, as it was only a visual trick compared to the attitude of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had bent on containing refugees without false democratic mechanisms, a popular referendum or public speeches in front of crowds in public places in order to politically employ the refugees’ issue, as the expected outcome would have been rejected in accordance with the mechanism of false democracy in Germany, as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas says.
Thus, the radical political stance regarding the humanitarian issues requires at times an act of great courage away from the bustle of loudspeakers in public places, which had become a vicious circle of Nihilism.
This leads us to stop by the speech of authority and opposition in Turkey, which always proves the famous saying of Mikhail Bakunin: “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.” This way, with less time than Bakunin had imagined, the political writer David Liska wrote his article on “Ahval News” to explain İmamoğlu’s betrayal of his promises after winning the municipal elections of Istanbul within a few weeks.
“There’re lots of Syrians who work without registrations as we have to protect our people’s interests, they just can’t change the color of Istanbul,” İmamoğlu said while describing the refugee crisis as a major shock last week, “The refugees must be isolated in camps if it’s necessary, or they must be re-educated.”
These two direct statements evoke the legacy of total exclusion in the structure of the modern Turkish state system against the others in the form of “smelting and isolation.” As ‘it’s not an ideological discourse formulated exclusively to match the recent Syrian refugee crisis in Istanbul, rather, it reveals a long historical mask, which imitates the imagination of the ideology builders of the Turkish authoritarian entity against the religious, national and cultural groups suppressed within Turkey before guiding the compass towards the odd outside.
Let’s think of the statement “safeguarding the interests of our people,” rather, it’s more correct to rephrase this term in its usual language and to say it in İmamoğlu’s words “the protection of our Turkish national security” against the other; the other is an alien that doesn’t apply to local legal status, as he doesn’t belong to Ataturk’s famous saying: “Nothing is better than being a Turk”, as he’s a refugee without a human rights nor a political identity and doesn’t have legal immunity, and he is subjected to a violent persecution after any tremor that could provoke the instigation of systematic popular incitement.
Therefore, this statement contains in its meaning, the story of stripping people of their legal and natural rights, and presenting them to the wave of violence without any censor. Isn’t this symbolic image of the Syrian refugee population identical to the fate of the detained political leader Selahattin Demirtaş and his comrades in prison?
Especially when İmamoğlu’s party (CHP) along with Erdogan and Devlet Bahçeli had lifted the parliamentary immunity of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputies and then put them in the prisons without any fair trials. Then wasn’t the term of “National Security” in itself the sword of Democles, which was impressed by Erdogan and CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu over the necks of people of the Syrian-Kurdish city of Afrin, in the time the ancient Kurdish cities in Turkey were being demolished under an arsenal of populist loads of those allegations?
In general, the scene of Turkish attackers following İmamoğlu’s statements, beating individuals and breaking down shops, intersects relatively with “Kristallnacht” when the Nazi mobs launched a comprehensive operation cracking of Jewish shops in Germany and Austria. But it’s not logical, to relate this explosive popular mobilization to the speech of İmamoğlu alone, there’s a massive mobilization in the Turkish cities by the working classes and the middle class, by the root of the economic crisis at the present time.
As this accumulated violation against the Syrian refugees has been documented for years by civil and human rights organizations, including indiscriminate killings, the construction of a separating wall on the border, looting and exploitation of cheap labor, and the organized crime against women in those Turkish cities hosting Syrian refugees.
These operations were used to be run silently by the Justice and Development government in collusion with the Islamic movements operating under the umbrella of the Syrian opposition coalition, and thus these incidents remained isolated by the media coverage, by the evasion of these parties of their legal and moral responsibilities, which was politically hiding themselves behind the mask of Erdogan’s fragile statement “We are all Muslims and brothers.”
İmamoğlu, who was fed up with some 559,000 Syrian refugees in the city of Istanbul, which embraces about 16 million people, doesn’t want to spoil the ancient and superior culture of Istanbul with some Arabic signs hanged on shops and has deep ecological concerns in changing the demographic features of Istanbul, as a result of gatherings.
This rhetoric was precisely imported by the Turkish immigrants who came from Thessaloniki, the Caucasus, and the Crimea at the beginning of the First World War with the purpose of launching the so-called “White Turkism” in the heart of the nascent republic.
As it was a speech adopted by the Republican People’s Party program based on the ideology of “superiority of the western white man” and rooted in the structure of the Turkish bourgeois class, the bureaucracy of the state, and secular militarism towards the various popular classes, which live in opposition to the style of the contemporary invented ideology of Turkism.
İmamoğlu presents himself as if unconsciously, is an enthusiastic defender of the far-right speech in Europe, which, in effect, is counteracting the effects of neoliberalism on the local economy, instead of confronting this fact, makes the process of compensation by creating the myth of scapegoat by exaggerating the issue of “refugees”.
Along with his party, İmamoğlu keeps silent regarding the Turkish state violence in Syria, specifically in Afrin, and at the same time blames the Syrians for dirtying the streets of Istanbul, and deliberately neglects the millions of the Kurdish and other marginalized people, who live in shabby neighborhoods in Istanbul, since the sixties of the last century, and the collapse of trade unions in the eighties following General Kenan Evren’s military coup, which left the working class in Turkey without any legal, political and humanitarian support.
Facing these contradictory certainties, İmamoğlu was looking for a magic solution that doesn’t come out as usual from the shell of the nation-state, where he demands the establishment of isolated camps for Syrian refugees, and the re-establishment of their cultural education.
With no doubt, this approach was a fertile material for the Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman in his book “Modernity and the Holocaust”, by invoking the concept of “gardening” to dismantle the Nazi vision in the face of the abnormal social phenomenon, i.e., the removal of the harmful plants out of the orchard and its isolation in the ghettos.
This speech, which revives the process of the modern nation-state in Turkey, has been brilliant in shaping the story of population engineering over the past century, which was conducted professionally on a social field called the “Kurds”, and as it continues now on a daily basis in the Syrian-Kurdish city of Afrin by the Justice and Development government, and with a legitimate approval by the Republican People’s Party.
Ironically, those Syrian elite groups who stigmatize İmamoğlu’s behavior in Istanbul today were the same Syrians who encouraged Erdogan in promoting the same practice in the Syrian region of Afrin.
If Erdogan is an exception in the pure violence, İmamoğlu, who reflects the rhetoric of power in Turkey, is the permanent base, according to Walter Benjamin, so how should we rationally interpret a person who denies the existence of 559,000 Syrians in Istanbul, in order to sympathize with 15 million Kurds who reflect the same image of refugees in terms of breaking the “legal and political identity”?
On top of that ordeal, İmamoğlu had days ago offered to help and coordinate with Erdogan himself, making the apparent difference in the discourse of power into a monolithic bloc.
Let the question form be reversed in this way, and exceed the argument of “the lesser evil”, wasn’t the rational prudence requires the Peoples’ Democratic Party choice in the Istanbul municipal elections, such as a protesting position of the masses of people as in José Saramago’s novel “Seeing”, where masses of people rushed into the polls by placing unanswered white cards without a “yes or no”, to express their discontent and condemnation of the false electoral process, in order to disrupt the entire system in a “Gandhi” manner, both peaceful and negative, as well as to respond to the ruling party blows and opposition parties, which reproduce the image of the same regime when they take up the power?