On February 10th, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), Kemal Okuyan, made an assessment about the disaster in the earthquake-hit region of southern Turkey:
“The darkness of the AKP along with the market economy based on exploitation and plunder cost the lives of tens of thousands of our citizens , and left millions of people homeless. This is a terrible, unacceptable, revolting situation. There is more. Turkey has become completely open to a new operation of domestic and foreign capital and imperialist centers.
Today, the official number of fellow citizens who died in the earthquake is increasing every hour. We aren’t talking about numbers, we are talking about people. We need to ask this question right away. Why did these people die? If we answer this question by saying “because of the earthquake”, we will go through the same disaster again and again. The market economy, this greedy system called the private sector and reaction have killed our people. It is crystal clear.
Now, the perpetrators of the massacre are planning a new attack.
The capitalist class has already begun to calculate how to turn the ruins of the earthquake into profit. The rapid appreciation of some companies in the stock market is evidence of how rapid the capitalists’ sense of smell for profits works. The domestic and foreign monopolies have already started to prepare projects for infrastructure investments, construction of new cities and so forth.
While the imperialist countries acted in line with the interests of their own monopolies, on the other hand, they did not waste any time to boost their influence on Turkey. The most exaggerated show of imperialist shamefulness is the US sending an aircraft carrier to Turkey, but the button has been pressed for more sneaky and covert moves.
Lastly, religious sects use all the means of the state to further alienate our citizens from science and reason, as if they did not play a major role in this collapse, they are using all the opportunities of the state for their own profit.
The board coalition that brought AKP to rule is on the move again. Local and international capital, imperialist centers and regional reaction is exploiting the earthquake in order to fully take over Turkey.
Yet, in this period, all the polish of the AKP government, which pursued policies that wanted to grab a bigger share of the cake and emulated the Ottoman Empire, is worn out and the helpless image that our country fell into is shaking Erdoğan too.
Turkey does not have public resources for the essential necessary social policies and will do necessary expenditures in order to satisfy the profit needs of private sectors. In this sense, Turkey has turned into a hunting ground for powerful imperialist countries, especially Germany, USA and England.
We know that an internal debate has also started in the AKP on this issue. They will either increase the load on our people to keep the tail upright, or they will surrender completely and attack our people once again, just like in the 1999 earthquake. In summary, in both cases, a very severe and dark period awaits our working people. The safety of our country and our people is under serious threat. I have to say this.
However, there is one more option. Turkey came out of the earthquake by learning some things. What we have learned is not just solidarity. We knew that the lack of planning and the dominance of the market economy was a big disaster, now millions have seen it. Those who live in the earthquake area and those who demonstrate solidarity in other regions have witnessed what we mean by “organized people”. TKP received much attention during this period, and the reason is obvious. We are organized, we believe in science, we are against the market economy, we act on the principle of planning.Turkey should make a counter move towards these beautiful values and demand the rule of the country as soon as possible. We have no time to lose.”
