Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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including a willingness to populate the binary categories of modernity and tradition with secularists and Islamists (e.g., Kalaycıoğlu 2012: 173), translate as a refusal to acknowledge one occluded but central dimension of the 1970s leftist-rightist ideological struggle: its character as an intra-Ataturkist dispute organized for many rightists and leftists around key Kemalist terms of nationalism/Turkism and anti-imperialism/independence respectively. Accordingly, the threat of “Islamic fundamentalism,” and more specifically a rally held in Konya by the MSP (Milli Selamet Partisi [National Salvation Party) a week before the coup is often cited as another legitimate reason for 12 Eylül (see Zürcher 1995, Gunter 1989, Ahmed 2003).7
Last, in some chapters “Kurdish separatism”—not ethnic Turkish chauvinism—is mentioned as a threatening tendency in south-east Turkey, and presented as a lawful concern in inciting military intervention (see Davison 1998, Howard 2001, Gunter 1989). In his memoirs, Kenan Evren himself claimed that there were eight “separatist” (bölücü) organizations operating in the southeast of Turkey before the coup (in Pope and Pope 1997). In such explanations there is little acknowledgment of the oppressive long-term project of assimilation directed toward Kurds by the Kemalist state, immediately reinforced by the junta’s banning of Kurdish after the coup. Nor is the notorious and extreme violence meted out to Kurdish inmates in Diyarbakır Prison after 12 Eylül much spoken about (see Odabaşı 1991), or the junta’s reorganization in 1981 of Turkish nationalist outlets like the Turkish Historical Society and the Directorate-General of Intelligence and Research, aimed at producing propaganda about ethnic minorities (see chapter 7).
By contrast, for scholars versed in dependency theory and the world-systems school, the crisis of state-led import-substituting industrialization (ISI) in the 1970s determined conditions for conflict over the mode of capital accumulation and its distribution (see for example Gülalp 1997, Keyder 1993). An exemplary study in this vein is Çağlar Keyder’s State and Class in Turkey (1987), which provides both a macroeconomic autopsy of the systemic failure of ISI in the 1970s and an account of its conditioning of political developments, including fragile and fragmented coalition governments, failed populism, intra- and inter-class rivalry and antagonism, and radicalization of a segment of the population alienated from center left and center right parliamentary politics. Keyder sets the crisis in the larger context of the Turkish economy’s incorporation into the world economy and division of labor, arguing that global capitalism provides a “set of constraints within which class struggle at the national level determines specific outcomes” (1987: 4).
In sum, presentation of the political or economic background to activists’ actions and relationships has dominated accounts explaining the years before and after the military intervention, alongside much repetition of the utterances of the makers of the coup. An underlying concern of both the synoptic political science and political economy approaches has been the political implications of the rapid urbanization of Turkey from the 1950s onward, seen most strikingly in the spread of shanty towns in Istanbul outside the boundaries of the historic city (see chapter 3). In the process, either the political-economic interplay between global and local class-actors, dysfunctional urbanization, or the misadventures of a more narrowly defined political system have been foregrounded as the appropriate lens through which to inspect selected features of the decade, as well as to explain activists’ activities. Indeed, economic developments are sometimes presented as the cause as well as the context of activists’ actions, through the assumption that actors’ calculation and pursuit of economic self-interest is the primary factor informing their motivations and decisions.
1.4 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
I make these points not to overly criticize such analyses, but more importantly to note that none of these approaches asked activists themselves what they thought they were doing, nor placed much value upon describing and analyzing phenomena such as the built environment, militant bodies, movement around the city, places, moods, ethics, violence, ideologies, or factions as perceived and remembered by participants. Even the more thorough discussions (such as Erich Zürcher’s 1995 Turkey: A Modern History) rarely encompass personal narratives, implying that individuals’ lives and experiences are best comprehended by their being aggregated and subsumed within these public, more collective, events. Yet surely the opposite is equally true: an account of the death of a child and its traumatic effect on a family illuminates the significance of infant mortality rates as much as a statistical graph pegging out its comparative percentages (see Pamuk 2014 for a comparison with other countries of Turkey’s declining rates between 1950 and 1980).
Equally curiously, the particularity of Istanbul and of its known, used, and efficacious places or built environments, in relation to which activists’ political passions were stirred and stimulated, seems also to have disappeared in the accounts sketched out above. Yet the built environments and homes of the shantytowns were more than sites of generalized conflict and mobilization, and Istanbul itself more than the “spatial manifestation” (in factories, workshops, and offices) of capital accumulation or political crisis. The city that people grow up in is an inhabited city.8 Writing about these years should also involve learning and revealing how activists heard, saw, felt, used and spoke about the city and its unstable parts, as well as their agonistic relationships with other emplaced inhabitants. Places were known through the senses of the body, and in situational and often-antagonistic relationship to other related places, not through their position on a map or, as in the case of the shantytowns, by their abstract apportioning in time, theorized as existing temporally somewhere between the city and the village.
“There was Kömürlük cafeteria in Aksaray, on the left of Tarlabaşı Bulvarı going toward the Marmara Sea, after the underpass; every group wanted to get control of it. Sometimes Dev-Yol occupied it, sometimes İGD [Progressive Youth Association]” (Ömer, İGD). Ümit remembered the same teahouse slightly differently: “On one side was the İGD Stalinists; on the other side farther down the row were the Maoists. No one ever passed between the groups or places.” Leftists also patronized Turizm Tea Garden in Kadıköy, just as Barboros Café and Mühendisler Kıraathanesi in Beşiktaş were places where leftist students met. Kulluk Kahvesi in Beyazıt was notoriously MHP; and Diriliş Kıraathanesi in Süleymaniye was important for MSP and Akıncı (its youth wing) activists. Places and people were singular, and nomenclature expressed ownership, as well as actual or admired social practices. For example, according to Metiner (2008: 73), Muslim activists named Diriliş coffeehouse after the book Diriliş neslinin amentüsü (Creed of a reborn generation), by the writer and poet Sezai Karakoç.
Steve Feld stresses the affective dimensions of place names: “Because [they] are fundamental to the description and expression of experiential realities, these names are deeply linked to the embodied sensation of places” (1996: 113). After the coup the junta changed May 1st, the Ümraniye shantytown settled and named by its militant residents, to Mustafa Kemal. In the city of a thousand killings it is the name of each dead activist—Şahin Aydın or Metin Yüksel—that makes them particular persons, grieved for by those who knew or loved them.
We will see how else we may gain a sense of the city, and of how it was sensed by its politicized inhabitants, in chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7, as well as in readings from newspapers and other archival material.9 The primary source of this sense of their city is the activists’ own accounts of their emplaced experiences and memories of Istanbul in the years before and after 12 Eylül. Analysis of them attests to activists’ own projects of spatial politics and production. Further, militants’ generation of space occurred not only through their labor in the constructing of roads and houses in politically sympathetic shanty towns, but also in their theatrically embodied gestures, choreographed movements, and noisy exchanges in urban space, and in their symbolic, affective, and imaginative relations with it. This focus on activists’ perceptions, urban knowledge, projects, and place-creation—for example through reverberating revolutionary songs—adds a complementary and much needed empirical dimension to the political economy and political science perspectives, while facilitating a necessary critique of the claims of the junta. It also enables us to learn