Ziya Ulusoy
“This antifascist awareness is of vital importance today, because the gang under Erdoğan and Bahçeli wants a repeat of the pogrom of 6-7 September,” writes Ziya Ulusoy for Yeni Özgür Politika.
It is the anniversary of the the pogrom of 6-7 September 1955. It is the duty of anti-racists everywhere to develop the awareness that will raise the cry of “Never Again!” against the pogrom of 6-7 September, as against all massacres.
This antifascist awareness is of vital importance today, because the gang under Erdoğan and Bahçeli wants a repeat of the pogrom of 6-7 September today. Its equal has already been repeated in terms of massacres. We are talking here about the desire to repeat it in the form of lynchings and pogrom.
The pogroms organised against the Dal and Dedeoğulları families in Konya on 21 and 30 July, as well as the killing of Deniz Poyraz in the Izmir branch of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) by the extreme nationalist Onur Gencer, who had been trained and assigned to duty by the Erdoğan/Bahçeli gang, carried the intention both of intimidating the Kurds by murdering them and of inciting the Turkish people to pogroms against the Kurdish people.
The dictatorship of Bayar and Menderes planned a pogrom for 6-7 September with the aim of achieving a number of goals, and carried it out mercilessly.
The gang under Bayar and Menderes wanted to prove its commitment to the US, the dominant force of the capitalist world, and to facilitate the US’s takeover of dominance over the Eastern Mediterranean from imperialist Britain…
The second goal was to increase chauvenism by inciting the Turkish people to attack the Greek people, and strengthen public support for the slogan, “Stand up for the Cyprus cause!”, which had started to weaken.
The third goal was to transfer the properties and businesses of the Greeks of Istanbul to the Turkish bourgeoisie.
There was to be an additional gain for the administration: the comical tactic of blaming the pogrom on the communists and creating an anti-communist atmosphere.
General Sabri Yirmibeşoğlu, head of the Special War Office at the time was to be praised for a confession he made in an interview he gave after his retirement in the 1990s, “The events of 6-7 September were the work of the Special War Office and it was a magnificent piece of organisation. And it achieved its aim.” (Tempo magazine, 09.06.91)
The Greeks of Istanbul lost three people. Thousands of homes and workplaces were plundered and destroyed. Seventy thousand Greeks were forced to emigrate to Greece.
Today too, the Erdoğan/Bahçeli gang wants to use renewed attacks to strengthen their weakening popular support, create fascist masses and chauvenist hysteria by inciting the Turkish people to attack the Kurds, accelerate the dirty and occupationist war against the Kurds at home and abroad, and by doing this, to suppress the anti-fascist strruggle.
They have started the renewed attacks, accelerating the bombardment of the Medya Defence Zones in South Kurdistan where there are guerrillas based. They have bombed the people’s self-defence and a hospital in Sinjar (Shengal) in air raids. They are hitting areas in Rojava where Kurdish people have settled who been driven there by the occupation, with tanks and mortar bombs.
Domestically the lynchings/pogroms in Konya and the assassination of HDP members in Izmir, the use of forest fires as a pretext for further lynchings, mass arrests of HDP members and the preparations to blacklist democrats from work all come together as renewed attacks. Internal competition within the gangs, the lynching of migrants and increasing fascist sympathies among the people have all come to the fore as potentially useful by-products of all this.
If democratic forces had been able to resist and prevent the pogrom of 6-7 September 1955 from the start, the aggression of the reactionary and fascist Bayar/Menderes gang would have been broken, and our peoples and the working classes would have walked a path in preparation for a different future.
Now the struggle to prevent the renewed attacks of the Erdoğan/Bahçeli gang and the lynchings of the Kurds will pave the way for the defeat of fascism, and the struggles of peace against war, freedom against fascism and socialism against capitalism will prepare a bright future for our peoples and the working classes.
Preparing for a bright future against the Erdoğan/Bahçeli gang’s repeat of 6-7 September and the pogroms against the Kurds is the only way to liberation!
