Istanbul

I'm now in Istanbul, after a somewhat eventful trip involving an unexpected extra night in Rome and arriving in Turkey without my luggage. I've been doing some touristing (pictures to follow), and I just had the unexpectedly non-sucky experience of doing a paper sale in a language where I don't speak more than 6 words (I managed to sell about 10 papers, which I think is better than I ever did in the states).

I've been hanging out with Antikapitalist, the IS Tendency group in Turkey. They managed to broker an electoral arrangement between a bunch of Left parties (in particular ÖDP, EMEP, and SDP, for those keeping track) and the main Kurdish party (currently called DTP, formerly DEHAP) which has gotten a huge level of involvement: 15,000 people signed the statement Antikapitalist started things with, and there are nearly 100 campaign offices in the Asian side of Istanbul alone, mostly set up by groups that sprang up from nowhere. The election is tomorrow; it seems pretty much guaranteed that a lot of the Kurdish candidates will get elected, and we'll see about the others. In any case it is already a big development, and it's cool to be able to say that I had a little tiny part in it.

Unfortunately a neofascist party, the MHP, is almost certain to make a big breakthrough as well. Their street wing, the Grey Wolves, has recently shifted from sending groups of 50-100 people to start rumbles with campus leftists to sending groups of 5-10 people to ambush individduals on their way to/from school, which is much harder to counter and much less likely to get into the newspapers -- the latter is particularly important right now since they are trying to turn "respectable".

Some of the folks I was talking to were very worried about the situation after the elections: the elections were moved up by several months as a result of the army's attempts a little while ago to break the back of the ruling AK Party, but AK looks set to get an even higher proportion of the votes than in the last election, which raises the possibility that the army and the nationalist parties will try something more aggressive.

I've finally had the roots of the political situation here properly explained to me. It seems like Turkey is one of a few places in the world today where the different political parties are genuinely based on different economic strata of the ruling class. The Kemalists (CHP) are tied up with the army -- which is also owns the third biggest holding company in Turkey -- and other sections of the state, and along with that the big banks, the local affiliates of multinationals, and various hangers on. The Islamists (mainly AK Party) get their support from small manufacturing concerns as well as more "traditional" sectors. This isn't compradors vs "patriotic" capitalists: the small manufacturers are very export-oriented, hence AK Party's fixation on joining the EU (as well as friendliness towards Iran and Russia), but there is a difference. The Kemalists meanwhile use 'secularism' and ethnic chauvinism, as well as outright military force, to keep a near-monopoly on state support and patronage.

This depends a lot on US support, including US help through international institutions which lets Turkey sustain (so far) a ridiculously overvalued currency and a massive trade deficit, both mostly subsidizing the lifestyles of a few people (Turkish CEOs are apparently the 5th best paid in the world). At the same time the Turkish military is still not very comfortable within its present borders -- witness the constant interventions into Iraqi Kurdistan, which many seem to want to ramp up even further.

Anyhow. I'm still waiting for my luggage (32 hours and counting), and about ready to fall asleep, so I won't try for an elegant conclusion. Instead see if you can figure out what's wrong with this picture, taken of a market stall in the middle of Istanbul. First to post the correct answer gets a vague sense of satisfaction, at least if you're as easily amused as I am: