On March 12, 1972, the Turkish army took direct control of the country. Despite the bogus facade of parliamentary trappings, all significant political and administrative powers are firmly in the hands of the army, which is directing operations against the Turkish people via a National Security Council.
The military regime in Turkey has been carrying out the most brutal repression to be experienced in the recent history of the country. There are between ten and fifteen thousand political prisoners in Turkey today, of whom nearly 2,000 have been subjected to the most vile tortures imaginable and in the course of which numerous prisoners have been killed.
A CAPITALIST SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN IN EUROPE A very considerable solidarity campaign with the Turkish military dictatorship has been launched in capitalist Europe. The British Foreign Secretary, Home, recently went out of his way during a visit to Turkey, to justify the regime's actions, praising its commitment to "law and order".
The Guardian, a bourgeois newspaper with liberal pretensions, has provided further support to the Turkish regime ( as it did in the past to the Ayub dictatorship in Pakistan!) and its "special correspondent" in Turkey (who really pays him?) recently provided us with the following gems: "The purpose of the army intervention was not to destroy the democratic system, but to restore 1. ..... "I think life in general is not affected." The Turkish Information ministry must have wondered why all the imprisoned Turkish journalists were not as servile and sy cophantic as The Guardian's "special correspondent". Despite the efforts of Amnesty International and the occasional article in the Sunday Times, allegations of torture have been dismissed by the European apologists of the regime as part of "a slander Information which has recently come to our notice leaves us in no doubt that Turkey (as its neighbour Greece) has become a veritable torture-chamber. The most important document is an affidavit of a defence lawyer defending victimised revolutionaries. On April-13, 1972, special police came to his office and arrested him. He was driven to a building, photographed, undressed and manacled. What happened next is described in his own words: "Facing me were a man in a civilian suit and a general. Some others, too, were present, but they were behind me and I was told I'd better not look back, or else I'd be killed. "The general first asked me where I thought I was. I said I thought it was the MIT (National Intelligence Agency) that I had been taken to. They said that I was not in MIT, but I was a captive in the hands of a counter-guerilla organisation. They said I was their prisoner and there existed neither Constitution nor things like law or legal rights; for them, my life had a value inferior to that of a dog. Their staff would decide whether I could survive any more. It they decided to do me to death I should be killed and my corpse thrown into the sea. Various insults then followed." They then made a number of accusations and encouraged the prisoner to make a false contession: "I rejected all the accusations. Then the general told me I would be handed to a commando group and left the room. I was blindfolded again and my hands and feet were chained. Then they began beating me and swearing. Their blows were skilled karate hits...... They beat the soles of my feet for a long time would not admit their accusations they . Then when I still connected my body to electricity..... "When they began connecting electricity to my head through my ears I felt 1 was about to go mad. The suffering was such that it appeared as if my brain would explode. There were no breaks this time. They kept it up continuously, regardless that I was throwing myself to the ground in the armchair to which I was tied..... They were also pouring water on my head when they applied electricity to my ears to increase conductivity. "Under these tortures I sometimes became so breathless as almost to die. At these moments I realised that their threats to kill me were not bluff and I decided that further resistance would be useless. I told the torturers that I might accept their terms except that if I conceded anything they surely would ask for more. They promised that the interrogation would end if I conceded to what they wanted. Thus I admitted that I saw the fugitives after they escaped from prison, in accordance with the demands of the torturers. "All the while I had to listen to the sounds of other prisoners being tortured, and also, I think, tape-recordings of my own interrogation. This experience lasted 23 days..... when they returned my clothes I realised I had lost 10 - 12 kilograms of weight during my imprisonment...... However they forced me to sign a written statement claiming that I had been "treated nicely..." This is the "law and order" to which DouglesHome and The Guardian glive their unashamed approval. There are hundreds of other cases where prisoners have undergone even worse experiences than the one described above. Torture is used primarily as a deterrent rather than to elicit information. It is aimed at creating apathy and despair within the mass movement. Special "counter-guerilla" torture centres with their own chain of command have been set up throughout Turkey. Their officers are drawn from the military, police and intelligence services and are answerable to no court or any other civil structure. In fact their very existence is denied by the Turkis bregime and those in the pay of its information ministry like certain "special correspondents." TORTURE FACILITATES ENTRY INTO EUROPE The torture and mass arrests are linked to the "development policy" of the Turkish bourgeoisie which will facilitate entry into the Common Market - a policy which will seriously cut down the already low living standards of the workers, poor peasants and certain petty-bourgeois layers. That is why the left (the only serious focus of dissent) has to be liquidated or "neutralised" (a word which Thieu also uses in South Vietnam). The policy openly favours the industrial bourgeoisie and foreign (i.e. European) investors. The public sector is used to finance investment with low profit rates, while the more wealthy areas are under the control of private capitalists. European capitalism thus aids the economic and political "development" of Turkey. What is an attractive investment for the capitalists of Burope has become a concentration camp for the Turkish people. Turkey has joined the ranks of Spain, Portugal, Greece and Northern Ireland to reveal in all its nakedness the "other" face of capitalist Europe, which symbolises terror, repression, brutality and concentration camps. The working class in bourgeois-democratic Europe should study this picture carefully lest they themselves fall into a similar trap.
Strong rank and file organisation needed to channel