Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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in which they dwelt—for example, the stealing and cooking of a süs köpeği (small house dog) by two youths because they were hungry (Tercüman, 2 October 1977, p. 5); or the unintended death of a three-year-old girl in Gültepe, killed on her balcony in a fight between two groups by either an “accidental” bullet (kaza kurşun in Cumhuriyet, 11 October), or a “traitor” bullet (hain kurşun in Tercüman, published on the same day).
In 1977 the school term in Istanbul opened with a severe shortage of textbooks and teachers. At one school of fifteen hundred students, packed into a place designed for seven hundred, the students felt it more useful to play football than to sit in classrooms with no teachers (Cumhuriyet, 16 October 1977, p. 7). In the same year, electricity cuts became a feature of daily life; two hours each day rolling out in turn over every district of the city (although never between 12:00 and 1:00 p.m., or on Sundays) (Cumhuriyet, 21 October 1977). Price rises of basic goods in September 1977 brought severe hardship for Istanbul’s poorer inhabitants, and rising school expenses meant that some families sent their children back to the village; many said that they could eat meat only during Bayram holidays. Cumhuriyet (16 October) published the “yoklar listesi” (list of missing goods) reporting which things were unavailable and where—salt in Malatya and Bursa; tüpgaz in Bingöl; mazot in Bitlis; cement in Mardin; wood in Adıyaman.
The list of price rises helps us understand a political campaign announced in Devrimci Yol newspaper on 24 October, bringing Dev-Yol’s supposedly “anarchistic” and “extremist” actions into logical relations with the broader urban condition. “Faşist zülme ve pahalılığa karşı direniş kampanyası’ açtığını bildirmiştir.” (We declare the opening of a resistance campaign against fascist oppression and inflation.) As part of the campaign, a meeting at Sultanahmet Square involved ten democratic organizations protesting against the price hikes. Participants included Halkın Kurtuluşu (People’s Liberation), YDGD (Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Association), İleri Müzik-İş Sendikası (Union of Progressive Music Workers), Perde ve Sahne Sanatçıları Sendikası (Union of Curtain and Theatre Artists), İleri Maden-İş (Progressive Mine Workers), Halk Ozanları (People’s Poets/Minstrels), Kültür Derneği (Culture Association), Yurtsever Devrimci Giyim İşçilleri (Patriotic Revolutionary Textile Workers), Fatih Halk Bilimleri Derneği (Fatih People’s Science Association), Kartal İşçi Derneği (Kartal Worker’s Association), and Gençlik Birliği (Youth Confederation). A group of women and children from Ümraniye’s “1 Mayıs” suburb marched at the front of protesters, carrying posters saying: “There is no water, electricity or school in our gecekondu” (Cumhuriyet, 24 October 1977, p.5).
1.3 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE 1970s
There are further reasons, too, for excising and examining these years. For one, over the last three decades there has been little detailed study about urban social movements and the broader practices and perceptions of activists and politically oriented civil society in Istanbul in the second half of the 1970s. Similarly, the lived experiences of activists and the mood of the city during three years of martial law (1980–1983) have rarely been described, nor in that new context have the changed spatial and social relations of its inhabitants. Jenny White notes the existence of a “mass amnesia” about the period, so much so that after 1980 “the violence that had characterized the preceding decade was effaced from public consciousness. No one wished to discuss it, even once the danger of arrest had receded” (White 2002: 41). Indeed, for the period of military dictatorship most political science accounts have focused on the generals’ managed return of government to restricted “civilian rule” as well as on the process of the drafting of a new Constitution, and have been unwilling or uninterested in writing about the perceptions and fate of activists.
This absence of research and lack of public knowledge is even more striking when we consider a subdued yet central understanding of Istanbul that has insinuated itself into the minds of its inhabitants and intellectuals alike: the 1980 military coup marks the great dividing line between the present “globalized” city and what is felt to be a foreign country of the past. For many analysts the 1980 coup d’état and its instituting of the Third Republic ushered in a new era in Turkish politics, a period characterized by the eclipse of previously dominant leftist movements and ideologies, and the emergence of an identity struggle between Islamists and secularists, as well as between pro-Kurdish movements and a bloody-minded State, all in the context of a newly liberalized, consumer-oriented and globalizing economy (e.g., see Houston 2001). Accordingly, most social science investigation of any particular contemporary urban phenomenon places its origin in the short durée of post-coup time.5 More than ever, Istanbul is a polarized and crowded mega-city of inferior apartments, monuments, shopping malls, five-star hotels, and luxury housing developments. Studies of Istanbul’s urban reconfiguration since 1980 have focused on a vast range of subjects, from the rise of gated communities on its urban fringes (Geniş 2007) to studies of gentrification in the older suburbs (Ergun 2004); from exploration of the commodification of its public spaces (Öz and Eder 2012) to investigation of the influence on its secular politics of transnational organizations and of the supra-state project of the EU (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005); from tracking of the city’s financial extension beyond Turkey itself (Sassen 2009) to analysis of new forms of social exclusion for the most recent generation of rural or Kurdish migrants to the city (Keyder 2005, Secor 2004). In each of them the coup indexes a formulaic baseline from which the trends of the present might be imagined, measured, and assessed.
Yet despite this widely held local knowledge concerning the defining significance of 12 Eylül as a threshold to a new global city, little research over the last three decades has focused directly on Istanbul and its activists in the critical years immediately before and after the coup. At worst, in some accounts 12 Eylül is barely mentioned, by-passed in the breathless rush to come to terms with neoliberal and global Istanbul. Sassen’s article about Istanbul (2009) is a case in point. According to her paradigmatic sense of the term, Istanbul is now a “global city,” identified by changing sets of numbers that measure its flows of money, people, and ideas. But in her analysis there are no national causes, actors, opponents, or makers of its “globalization,” nor is there a discussion of the city’s actual history apart from that alluded to in the title, its “history” as a place of “eternal intersection.”
Why? Why this local (ac)knowledge(ment) that the military coup in 1980 is the crucial event in the long-term reengineering of the city, alongside an apparently effaced intellectual curiosity and public memory about what it was like to live, organize, agitate, mobilize, and suffer in Istanbul at that time?
One possibility is that the years constitute a collective trauma in the lives of many who lived through them, their excesses perceptually overwhelming and therefore difficult to comprehend. In his introduction to The Making of Modern Turkey Feroz Ahmad notes in a single terse paragraph on the 1970s that “political violence and terrorism, which have yet to be adequately explained, made the lives of most Turks unbearable” (1993: 13). Similarly, in her recent book Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, Jenny White summarizes the decade in three brief paragraphs, relating how “violence and ideological extremism were inescapable.” She finishes by recounting her relieved escape from the situation: “Having lived through three years of street violence in Ankara, where I was studying at Hacettepe University, I pocketed my master’s degree and left the country in 1978” (2013: 34, 35).
Reflections upon my fieldwork and interviews with ex-activists add something critical to Ahmad and White’s brief “outsider” comments on urban life. True, militants’ accounts of activism in the years before 12 Eylül document their participation in acts of violent militancy, in what Samim described as their “‘liquidation’ of the felt validity of the revolutionary experience of others” (1981: 84). Yet unlike the characters in novels described by Irzık (2010) in her analysis of 1971 coup d’état fiction, who are invariably depicted as persecuted by the State despite their innocence, the activists interviewed for this research did not protest that their victimization as leftists was mutually incompatible with the experiential realities of engaging in democratic and sometimes revolutionary action, including their own acts of violence. Indeed, the interviews revealed something different—the