Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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and ex-comrades who had never come to terms with the things that happened to them in the years of martial law. If being unable to come to terms with past experience is another form of remembering, it testifies to how the past “follows us at every instant . . . pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside” (Bergson cited in Ingold and Hallam 2007: 11). None the less, this pressure was also politically generated: after the coup, the State punished many people involved in activist movements through the banning of their employment in government ministries; discrimination against them via expulsion from study and work; and the withholding of passports or, for political refugees overseas, stripping them of citizenship. Nine thousand members from Maden İş (Mineworkers Union) were blacklisted and unable to gain employment in that field again.
Revolutionary Istanbul and its events live on in ongoing legal trials too, petitioning or extracting memories from activists and overturning both the junta’s efforts to mandate closure and different governments’ wishes to enforce statutes of limitations. To give just one example, in July 1980 Kemal Türkler, founder of DİSK and chairman of the union Maden İş, was murdered in the street outside his house in Istanbul. The public prosecutor indicted four Ülkücü militants for the killing, who were acquitted by one court, only to have that verdict quashed by another. Three decades later, in 2010, the first court ruled that the case had to be dropped because of lapse of time.13 Outside the court, the then DİSK chairman vowed to continue the legal process, and in 2013 the accused murderer was once again on trial. In court Kemal Türkler’s daughter remembered the event she witnessed: “I was 18 years old when my father was killed in front of me. I saw with my own eyes three people kill my father in interlocking fire. I saw the murderers, and I recognize them. Indeed, I even saw which gun jammed. For a full 31 years I have lived out this scene many times, I am still living it.”14
In sum, rather than being “lost forever” with the radical transformation of Istanbul, the city of the fearless continues to live on and with its ex-activists. A city that has been experienced “is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometric space” (Bachelard 1994: 47). Indeed, far from sparsity of recall, the power of places, songs, objects, legal techniques, and bodies to evoke memories and affect through their registering of inhabitation and trauma reveals a lingering surfeit of particulars concerning those years. The reason is clear: individuals’ memories of the past and their perceptions of the present are intimately related. This relationship explains how the interview process itself facilitated awareness of things once unnoticed or unutterable: because the past is not set off from the present as completed event (fading with the passing of time), its prompted remembering (in interviews) allowed new impressions to come into being, according to activists’ present perspectives.
2.3 POLITICIZING ACTIVISM
Alongside the dynamic constitution of ex-militants’ memories of revolutionary Istanbul in the ongoing context of their engagements with the urban world, activists retrospectively identified at least two other efficacious political developments as significant in informing and transforming impressions and assessments of their past experiences and actions. One significant event concerns the decades-long legitimation crisis of Kemalism, the foundational ideology of the Turkish Republic. Activists’ first disappointment with Kemalism can be traced back to the 1971 military intervention, which dashed the (in retrospect) naive 1960s hope of many leftists that a progressive faction of the military might join in a “national democratic revolution,” in a replay of the 1920s. An equally important factor in activists’ own critical realization of Kemalism’s repressive character can be traced back to the torture dealt out as a matter of course to hundreds of thousands of people arrested after 12 Eylül. The consequence has been a pressing need felt by activists in the 1990s and 2000s to critically reexamine Kemalism’s pristine years in search of clues to the abuses of the junta. In the process, they have been forced to uproot commitments to previous ways of configuring ethico-political perceptions and urban militancy. As previously mentioned, in the 1970s, both leftists and rightists found powerful support for their respective programs of revolution and nationalism in founding tenets and practices of the state Kemalist project. Indeed, according to Serdar (Kurtuluş),
In the 1970s no one knew that we were all Kemalist. I’ll explain with an anecdote. In 1968 the US fleet came to Istanbul. The left declared that it would never come ashore; they got some boats and prevented some of the sailors from landing. It was said, “we threw them into the sea” [denize döktük]. The phrase was connected to the official history of the “Liberation War,” which anyway is a hoax. The Greek army invaded Anatolia (encouraged by the British), and it was the British who threw some Greeks overboard when they were fleeing from the Turkish army in Smyrna. Now that it’s time for the left to differentiate itself from Kemalism, it is hard for it to do.
Here Serdar identifies how leftists’ response to an ostensibly novel event—the visiting of the US Sixth Fleet as part of NATO arrangements in 1968—was interpreted by protestors through an analogy generated from the official history of the founding of the Republic, a temporally backgrounded aspect of activists’ education deployed to orientate action in a changed situation. Similarly, Ertuğrul (Biliș Trade Union) critically analyses how in the 1970s certain tenets of Kemalism—we might call them horizons of the past that entered into activists’ perceptions both as history of one’s body and as recollections, habits and moods—were taken up by many activists to constitute a political program:
At the 1920 Baku congress, in an act of political desperation, the Comintern declared eastern people were oppressed peoples of the world—oppressed by imperialism. It was a declaration of the right of nations to self-determination. We [the left] began to confuse nationalism with anti-imperialism, which is an aspect of capitalism. Kemalism was nationalist, statist, and populist, never Marxist or working class. It was a national independence movement. If you are not essentially an anti-capitalist movement, then you gravitate to the nation-state, especially when it has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism. You support local elements [bourgeoisie, state, progressive peasants] against foreign imperialism. And there you have the lineage from YÖN [leftist Kemalist journal 1961–67] through Devrim Dergisi [Revolution, a journal in late 1960s] to the fascism of today’s Türk Solu [Turkish Left, journal and name of an ultranationalist, socialist group active in the present]. This is a leftist sickness in Turkey.
Both Serdar’s and Ertuğrul’s comments express a fundamental modification in their present perception of their own faction’s political practice in the 1970s. Many of the ex-activists I interviewed were now acutely critical of Kemalism, its ambiguous history, and its ongoing political influence. Similarly, nearly all had disengaged from contemporary attempts of leftist Kemalists (such as Türk Solu) to mobilize support around a laic-Islamist polarization in their attempt to reinvigorate a Kemalist program, including a continuation of its historic Turkification project directed at Kurds.
A third account of transformed awareness is given by leftist journalist and writer Hasan Cemal, who in 1969 started writing in the left-Kemalist journal Devrim (Revolution), mentioned by Ertuğrul above. In a foreword written in 2008 for ex-Akıncı militant Mehmet Metiner’s book Yemyeşil şeriat, bembeyaz demokrasi (Green shariah, white democracy), Cemal reflects upon his own recently published book: “It is never easy to come to terms with the past nor to confront yourself. I, too, could no longer escape my past. Indeed, this is what I tried to explain in my book Let no one be angry, I wrote myself. In it I endeavored to explain how my political identity developed, where my political ideas derived from and which mistakes I made” (in Metiner 2008: 16). Cemal also references his journey away from the certainties of what he calls “Jacobin” Kemalism. In his book, Metiner, too, describes a parallel political evolution, from his militant years in the late 1970s as a member of an Islamist youth organization, to his rejection in the mid-1990s of the foundational tenets or paradigm of “Jacobin” Islam, including abandonment of his 1970s fantasy of forcing sharia law on the population through establishment of an Islamic state.
A second and equally powerful event identified by activists as crucial in radically modifying the meaning of their 1970s activism, in particular for revolutionaries and parties identified with the communism of the Soviet Union, was the collapse of that regime in 1989. For many activists (especially those