24.04.2025

Rise of DEV-GEN Z

University students and high school students have taken the lead. Workers too have moved into action. Esen Uslu reports

The recent blunders of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime have led to a huge upsurge of opposition. While the Republican People’s Party (CHP) seemed to take the lead, the honour of carrying the torch has passed to a new generation of student activists - and now the regime is determined to make them pay the price.

Hundreds of university students were arrested during the impromptu demonstrations at the end of March. Around 300 of them were charged with public order offences and imprisoned. To dampen things down a nine-day-long holiday - conjured up by adding together the Eid al-Fıtr religious celebrations and a weekend - led to many students returning to their home towns.

The detained students were subjected to ill treatment, such as strip searches, deprivation of their prescribed medicines, denial of their school books, and not being allowed to take exams. They were then released in batches after appearing in court. Today only 95 of them remain in detention, and their court appearances are scheduled for October.

However, high school students also got involved. They staged boycotts and sit-ins in support of their teachers, who were arbitrarily transferred to other schools. There was a new wave of arrests in many provinces. In every major city, students took their protests to the courthouses on the day those detained were brought before the judges. Released students were greeted with celebrations that turned into demonstrations.

Questions

Meanwhile hundreds of high school students have been subjected to disciplinary investigations by the administration, and forced to answer questions such as “Why did you stand by your teacher?” Eğitim-Sen, the teachers’ trade union, declared its support for the students, as demonstrated in the city squares with the slogan: “Don’t be shy. If you remain silent, you will be the next.” Many parents have formed support groups to provide legal defence and moral and material support for their children. Many students will lose their grants and scholarships as well as their beds in public dormitories. So the state is trying to ‘educate’ them by inducing poverty.

Meanwhile Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of İstanbul, remans in pre-trial detention, while a bill of indictment is prepared. Protests and calls for early elections are growing. Increased economic hardship amid exorbitant inflation, as well as the recent cold snap that damaged crops, have also spurred farmers to protest. In Yozgat, one of the quiet towns in central Anatolia, thousands of farmers took part in a demonstration along with their tractors.

There are many strikes in the factories - including the leading petroleum products distillery, Tüpraş, one of the biggest private companies in Turkey - over wages and conditions. The situation is the same in state enterprises. In most cases the wage increases offered are far below the expectations of workers, who have suffered a lot from the hyperinflation of recent years and have seen their real wages hugely decrease.

The state bureaucracy is unable and unwilling to meet these expectations and demands. While, in the crisis of confidence caused by the arrest and trial of İmamoğlu, it was ready to eat into Turkey’s foreign currency reserves to the tune of $50 billion in just a few days, it claims it is unable to pay better wages to public-sector workers.

The current bureaucratic state was inherited from the Ottoman regime, however, it has become a self-supporting cycle and today 5.5 million people in Turkey are state employees. In 1931, when the population was 13.5 million, there were 115,000 civil servants. That meant one civil servant for every 120 people. In 2024, when the population reached 85.7 million, there were 5.2 million civil servants: ie, one civil servant for every 16 people. Given all the improvements in information technology that have allowed other countries to reduce the number of people they need to employ, this increase in public employees is actually a very good indicator of the populist policies of governments that hands out ‘jobs for votes’. Not surprisingly, Turkey is in the ‘low output-high employment’ category in the efficiency ratings of countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

We also have to take into account that 30.6% of young people of Turkey are not in employment, education or training, while the OECD average is just 16.8%. And the regional variation is also very important, as the average for Kurdish provinces is around 44%. As a result of all this - ie, only the well-connected could get state employment, and even their wages or salaries were barely enough to survive on - it is not surprising that there is a brain-drain, which will continue as long as western countries are willing to accept well-educated young-people.

The other aspect of the same story is rising crime. Turkey and Cyprus are fast becoming fertile ground for smuggling, illegal betting and money-laundering, and gangland assassinations. A scandal involving Turkish foreign service officers and Greek and Turkish Cypriot gangsters was recently exposed by a journalist from the daily Bugün Kıbrıs (Cyprus Today).

Kurds

However, the ‘Kurdish problem’ is still poisoning the minds of the petty-bourgeois opposition, and hindering the formation of a bigger front, while the Erdoğan regime is doing its utmost to prevent such an eventuality. Indeed it is attempting to bring the Kurdish freedom movement in its tow.

The main mechanism that moves the Erdoğan regime in this respect seems to be developments in Syria. The recently installed regime arrested two high-ranking representatives of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organisation in Damascus and closed its offices. That earned Ahmed al‑Shara brownie points in the US and Israel, as his organisation, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was one of the most ardent supporters of Hamas. Clamping down on Islamic Jihad was part of the long list that the US presented to the new regime in Damascus. Its foreign minister has recently visited the US and he delivered the good news to the Trump administration.

Another point was the agreement to convene the Kurdish National Unity Congress in northern Syria. Under the auspices of the US, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Kurdish Nationalist Council in Syria (formed by 14 small parties supporting Masoud Barzani, former president of the Kurdish region of Iraq) will meet on April 26. It is expected to provide the basis for Kurdish representation in the future of Syria - a key demand of Turkey, which does not want SDF to appear as the sole representative of the Kurds. In this way, Turkey will save face when entering into negotiations with Kurdish leaders.

In return, the US is halving its current troop numbers in Syria and has begun to withdraw them from all smaller bases in the oil production fields except Tishreen Dam. The SDF has also started to withdraw its forces from Dair al-Zor and Raqqa, after leaving Kurdish-controlled districts of Aleppo and transferring military control to the new Syrian regime. As long as this process of ‘normalisation’ continues, the Erdoğan regime’s breathing space will grow.

Another aspect of these developments concerning the Kurds is the Turkish-Israeli non-conflict agreement reached in Baku with the help of the Azerbaijan regime (the main supplier of oil products to Israel). The agreement is a body blow for some sections of the Kurdish movement, who expected to see Israel pitted against Turkey.

Now the clock is ticking for the congress of the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey to be held in order to decide on ending the armed conflict. No date has been set and most probably we will never hear about it before it is actually held. Meanwhile, a reduced delegation of the left, pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy Party has once more visited the prison island of Imralı to talk to Abdullah Öcalan, the undisputed leader of the Kurdish freedom movement. The delegation was reduced because two of its leading members have suffered from serious health problems.

Despite these setbacks, the peace process still seems to be working. As long as it delivers at least some of the expected results, there is a chance for the Erdoğan regime to remain in power. However, there are still many uncertainties that could derail the process.

The most important possibility is that the new opposition, which is coalescing around the CHP leadership, starts to bridge the gap between it and the Kurdish freedom movement. There are still many vibrant forces within the left wing of that movement which prefer to work with the opposition instead of being seen as a prop of Erdoğan’s regime. Will they be able to lead the movement or will they be forced to toe the line dictated by circumstances?

The new petty-bourgeois left is not able to give any support to the Kurdish freedom movement, because it has not got rid of its own Kemalist version of nationalism and secularism, which leads it to see Kurds as separatists and religiously backward. And nowadays these left forces tend to evaluate the developments in Syria (and especially the US ploys there) as an aspect of the Kurds becoming a toy in the hands of imperialism.

Youth

In short, the burden of resisting the Erdoğan regime is falling on the shoulders of a new generation of youth. They are very different from the old times, but they have their strength and refreshing vigour. In the 60s the revolutionary youth organisation was called DEV-GENÇ which is an abbreviation for ‘Rev-Youth’. But in the abbreviated form, DEV also meant ‘Giant’. So, it sounded like Giant-Youth. The older generation sniff at the new generation as the apolitical ‘Generation Z’. The young people marching in the streets adopted the old traditions and insults and started calling themselves ‘DEV-GEN Z’: ie, ‘Revolutionary Generation Z’.