Turkish generals and West German bosses
NATO-RAKETES
NATO-FOLTER inder SAKET
The following was published as a lead article in the April 29 issue of Was
Tun, the fortnightly paper of the International Marxist Group, German section of the Fourth International. It has been slightly shortened. The translation is by
West German and foreign workers, NATO-AVRUPADA occupied the Rockwell-Goide engineering
NATO- TÜRKİYE'DE In response, the management thought that it was a good idea to appeal to the Turkish consulate. They wanted to get the representatives of the military dictatorship to put pressure on the Turks to abandon this action in opposition to the layoffs.
The Rockwell-Goide bosses did the workers movement the service of showing that there is a connection between the support that West Germany, as a NATO member, gives to the brutal dictatorship in Turkey and the attacks on the rights of foreign workers and the growing antiforeignism in this country.
"NATO=Torture in Turkey," Turkish workers in Germany (DR) The interests of the West German banks and businesses are served not only by the fact that the generals have "restored order" in Turkey through torture and terror. The long arm of the military dietatorship is also welcome in this country, if it intimidates Turkish and Kurdish immigrant workers and keeps them from with German workers to fight The suppression and persecution of the only independent labor confederation in Turkey, DISK, and of all the working-class political organizations in Turkey, and the terror unleashed against Kurdistan serve the same profit interests as the growing witchhunt against foreign worktheir families, the attempts to make them the scapegoat for the capitalist crisis, and to expell them from the factories and the country as an excess reserve army of labor.
Since the military coup of the NATO generals on September 13, 1980, more than 100,000 people have been jailed in Turkey. The junta's terror machine is being built up on the basis of repressive laws that were already in force there was still a parliament in Ankara and legal political parties.
Articles 141 and 142 of the state security code, which were borrowed from Mussolini's 1937 constitution, ban associations that seek to "abolish any social class or overturn any of the economic or social foundations of the established or-
Any reference to the existence of the Kurdish nation amounts to "separatism." Torture and military courts have given these laws a new cutting edge. The 52 DISK leaders on trial in Ankara are being tried on the basis of the paragraphs mentioned above.
Since September 13, 1980, the military prosecutors have asked for the death penalty for 3,820 persons. Fourteen executions have been carried out. gime claims that it is applying the law even handedly against both the left and the right. But in only 491 cases has the death penalty been asked against rightists, and only three have been executed. In the military prison in Diyarbakir on March 21, at least ten Kurdish prisoners were murdered. The prisoners were fighting back against the way they were being treated by means of hunger strikes and
The conditions the prisoners were protesting against, according to a report by a Republican Lawyers Association that went to the spot in September 1981, included: exercise in lockstep; forced memorization of quotes from having to crawl for hours on hot concrete, 40 degrees celsius in the shade; and the burning of beards and other facial
In its report, a delegation from the International League for Human that visited Turkey at the beginning of this year cited the following case as an example of the systematic torture that
A local official of the textile workers union, Ismail Cengul, was arrested in
Kayseri on January 8, 1981. other prisoners were tied to heating pipes and beaten for eight days with clubs. They were given electrical shocks. Their fingernails and toenails were pulled out. They were sprayed with both cold and
(Frankfurter Rundschau, April 14, 1982.)
This terror serves to maintain economic "order" from which the International Monetary Fund expects repayment of Turkey's more than 20 billion dollars in foreign debt. It is to make the Western investments in Turkey profitable.
Together with the governments of other countries, Bonn has shored up the dictatorship with billions of Marks. Today, Bonn officially still considers that a state of law prevails in Turkey. The appropriation of 130 million Marks for 1982 was reapproved in November. ditional Turkish aid for 1982 is only "being held up temporarily."
Turks coming to West Germany in search of work and asylum find themselves facing conditions like those in Turkey. The international solidarity that was so much talked about on May Day has to have two sides. It has to involve opposing West German support for military dictatorships such as the one in Ankara. It has to include opposing a split in the working class between German and foreign workers, which in conditions of economic crisis and mass unemployment could dangerously undermine the fighting power of the unions.
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