The decision of the Turkish state and the AKP government to arrest and remove  from the office the Mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, as well as the subsequent repression of the demonstrations and the mass arrests of protesters, including members of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth of Turkey, revealed the intensity of the repression in Turkey.

It is clear that police state, “independent” and “impartial” judiciary is not the exclusive prerogative of Erdoğan or the Turkish bourgeois state. All these were an arrow in the quiver of the opposition Republican People’s Party of Turkey and are used at will by all bourgeois anti-people regimes around the world. Could it be otherwise at a time when the Turkish bourgeois state occupies 40% of Cyprus and territories in Syria and Iraq, and openly disputes the treaties defining the borders, the sovereign rights of Greece and even the sovereignty of Greek islands?

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What is impressive is not the unacceptable anti-democratic steps of the Erdoğan government, but how they are perceived by our “allies”, i.e. the EU, NATO and the USA. All of them have been praising “democracy” and “freedom” for decades, sometimes celebrating the “fall of the wall” in Berlin, sometimes the so-called “Arab Spring”, sometimes the Ukrainian “Maidan” together with the neo-Nazis, as well as the various “colourful revolutions” around the world.

Now they have fallen silent, or are mincing their words just for the sake of appearances. We focus on these powers not because Russia and President Putin have a different attitude towards Erdoğan and the anti-democratic slide of bourgeois democracy in Turkey, but because it was the Euro-Atlantic powers that were presented as the “guardians of democratic principles”.

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This attitude of the USA, the EU and NATO shows how hypocritical their positions on the “democracy” of the so-called “free world” are  —nothing more than a fig leaf that hides the class exploitation, social injustice and oppression oozing from every pore of this barbaric capitalist exploitative system. And if Putin is sitting on the fence, it is because he thinks that Turkey’s role as a mediator and a “matchmaker”, chosen by the dominant section of the Turkish bourgeoisie under Erdoğan, suits the Russian monopolies.

The Euro-Atlantic powers also have their plans. They have long talked about the need to detach Turkey from Russia’s “malign influence”. Now they are openly trying to exploit Erdoğan’s neo-Ottomanism by making Turkey their strategic partner. Sometimes they present Turkey as an indispensable asset for the “European defence strategy”, sometimes as a “guarantor” regarding the developments in Syria, where the jihadists who were armed and nurtured by Turkey have formed a government, and sometimes as a “counterbalance” to Russian capitalist interests in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Africa, and so on.

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Like a skilful acrobat, Erdoğan tries to get the maximum gains for the Turkish oligarchy by exploiting the aggravation of the inter-imperialist contradictions. It turns out that the tightrope he is walking on is the same one that limits and restricts all the bourgeois democratic freedoms of the people of our neighbouring country. By reciting a quotation of the anti-communist and anti-Soviet “dissident” A. Solzhenitsyn in his last speech, and by arresting dozens of members and cadres of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth of Turkey, the Turkish President proves once again that anti-communism goes hand in hand with any curtailment of the democratic rights of the people.

The KKE will continue to express its solidarity with the people and the Communist Party of Turkey and demand an end to the repression and persecution and the release of those arrested. The peoples of Turkey and Greece, against the hatred of the nationalists, can and must strengthen their common struggle against the system that gives rise to exploitation, oppression, police state, authoritarianism and wars.

By Eliseos Vagenas,

 member of the CC of the KKE and head of the IRS of the CC of the KKE

The article was published on Tuesday 1^st April in the newspaper Rizospastis, THE organ of the CC of the KKE.