11.07.1996

Dockworkers’ struggle in Turkey

Hasan Biber is the leader of Liman-Is, a militant dockworkers’ union in Turkey. Biber was in London to take part in an international trade union. Before he returned to Turkey I was able to speak to him.

First of all, Biber spoke about his union, and about the situation in Turkey generally. “My union numbers 7,000 members, organised in all the major ports of Turkey” he said. The effects of monetarism and privatisation had weighed heavily on dockworkers, like others in the country. They received low wages, were easily sacked and had no rights. Biber said Liman-Is had “generalised politics” “We do not confine ourselves to economic struggles, but also fight for human rights.” All laws in Turkey were in the service of the bourgeoisie and imperialism and every action by his union was deemed illegal. Crackdowns by the authorities were frequent. The most ordinary union activities could result in police harassment, arrest and torture. He himself had been arrested on 20 separate occasions in the past year, and many other trade union leaders and activists had similar experiences.

Biber added that his union had made it clear it did not accept the dictates of the International Monetary Fund in relation to Turkey’s economy. The IMF amongst others had unleashed a wave of privatisation in every area of the country’s life.

“Conditions in Turkey are worse than Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. Torture, murder and disappearances are the order of the day. The government wants to kill political prisoners. These prisoners are seeking better conditions for themselves, but the government calls them terrorists.” The authorities also used chauvinism as a weapon against Turkey’s ethnic and cultural minorities (Biber himself is a member of Turkey’s Arab minority). Biber said the destruction of a Turkish flag at a recent congress of the Kurdish HADEP party had been the work of “provocateurs” and had simply given the state the excuse to call down yet more repression.

Children in Turkey lived under “the shadow of arms”, Biber said. It had turned into a “society of fighters”. The struggle by trade unionists there was a struggle against war, a struggle to pass on a better society to their children.

I asked Biber if the authorities used strike-breakers against his union. He replied that in the past they had tried to use a fascist trade union confederation called MISK. This ended in failure. Now they were using Hak-Is, which was Islamist. The Islamists had done well in recent elections in Turkey. At the moment Turkey was in the throes of trying to form a government, but there was a possibility that a Hak-Is leader would be appointed as a government minister with responsibility for labour issues.

I then asked Biber about the state of mind of workers in Turkey. “There was a reaction among them against the wave of privatisations,” he said.

“Of course, politically conscious people were always against it, but when sackings started, many thousands more began to learn what was really going on. For example, after electricity was privatised, prices rose to an incredible degree, and people reacted against this. There was also popular hostility to the privatisation of the SSK, a major social insurance foundation. On the other hand, ordinary people fear prison and torture, and this limits the degree of resistance to the anti-social policies of the authorities.”

I asked him if there was a possibility of a renewed military coup in Turkey along the lines of the bloody crackdown in 1980. Biber said the Turkish authorities were under heavy pressure from Western governments to lift the emergency situation in Kurdistan. The government in fact wanted to lift it, but only in order to replace it with a battery of new laws allocating extra powers to provincial governors. They would have the power to close down trade unions in their province, declare martial law for periods of three days and so on. Such laws would make a military coup unnecessary by carrying through much the same degree of repression but in a localised way that would not attract as much attention. Liman-Is was campaigning against the laws, however.

I commented that in Britain there seemed to be a good deal of apathy and acquiescence among trade unionists and workers at present. Biber replied that he was fully aware of the struggle of the Liverpool dockers and he had received a signed certificate from them. I thanked Biber for speaking to me and wished him luck and success in the future. I learned later that I had an invite to visit Biber at the headquarters of Liman-Is back in Turkey.

John Craig