'Midnight Express' a racist attack on Turkish people

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march in support of striking metal workers in A Turkish Trotskyist examines the reasons why both the Turkish government and the Turkish left have attacked the controversial new film 'Midnight Express'.

This film is based on the real life experience of Billy Hayes, a young American arrested while trying to smuggle two kilos of hashhish.

After serving seven years in a Turkish prison he finds himself sent down for a further 30 years. Driven by desperation he manages to escape.

Much of the film focuses on the horror of prison conditions in Turkey. But there is more to it than that.

Director Alan Parker skilfully exploits the appalling conditions, savage sentences and physical maltreatment meted out to Hayes in order to provoke hostility to Turks.

He tries to create an image of the Turkish people as somehow inherently barbaric. • Reactionary It is this racist, reactionary thrust which determines the impact of the film as a whole.

Even in attempting to answer his critics on this point, Parker reveals his reactionary position:

"The characterisation of the film as racialist and fascist shows that it has been understood wrongly.

"Our aim is to criticise the judicial system which is bad, degenerated, and does not have the essentials.

"Turkey is a militarist country which is ruled by a fascist administration. The Turks slaughtered the Armenians and they are famous for their extreme barbaric character."

Such d statement combines violent hatred for the Turkish people with a willful political confusion.

Turkey is not yet ruled by "a fascist adminstraTurks tion"

Rather, it ruled by a liberal talking bourgeois democratic government headed by Ecevit, under constantly growing threats of a military or a fascist take-over.

And, this while precarious situation becomes steadily more unstable, the class collaboration of the reførmist and Stalinist leaders of the Turkish workers' movement disarms the working class and increases the risk of a right wing coup.

Acute dangers

To say that Turkey is now ruled by fascists is to minimise the acute dangers faced by the Turkish working class.

But this is not the only way that Parker conveys a message that assists the fascists.

Hiding behind the understandable bitterness and Midnight Express director Alan Parker LET hostility of a man who barely escaped a further 30 years in a hell-hole of a jail, the film revels in such racialist statements as: "For a nation of pigs, it's funny you don't eat it" and "T hate your nation and people and I fuck your sons and daughters"

Parker's hollow claim to expose the repressive character of the Turkish regime is nothing but a COVeT for his consistent identification of the regime with the Turkish people as a whole and the supposedly "barbaric" Turkish "character."

And even were his portrayal of prison conditions to have an impact the racialism of the film is such THAT the Turkish government, its diplomats ir Europe, and communities of Turkish workers number of countries have been struggling to stop the illm being shown.

significant that although the film was made Algeria and not in Turkey, Parker had clearly been to some trouble ensure that at the end of the film the prison walls could be seen plastered with Turkish fascist posters proclaiming the slogan nation without nationality."

"One nation"

It is a slogan which insists that Turkey is "one nation"-thus. denying any rights to the oppressed national minorities.

And in its insistence upon national divisions it is also an anti-communist şlogan.

As such it is central to the current fascist offensive in Turkey, which, amid violent attacks on working class and student militants, calls on backward workers and the middle class to "defend the nation" against its "enemies"

These "enemies" of course are revolutionaries, trade unionists and progressive forces.

This was the ideology behind the March 1971 coup in which hundreds of trade unionists and revolutionaries were killed and hundreds more jailed and tortured under conditions far worse than Billy Hayes could have dreamed of in his worst nighmares.

The real exposure of the repressive regime. in Turkey can only be carried out by establishing the conflict of interest between the ruling class and the oppressed masses in Turkey.

Only in this way can international solidarity be established between the Turkish working class, the oppressed minorities within Turkey and every other section of workers internationally, in the struggle against the common enemy -the capitalist class in each country.

"The working men have no country" , proclaimed Marx and Engels years ago in the Communist In order to put an end to the repression and torture in Turkey and elsewhere it is necessary to follow the conclusion of that founding statement:

"Working men of all countries, unite!"

LONDON A OFFICIAL PICKET Social workers are SOUTHWARK already fighting attacks on conditions PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report

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FASİZ KAHREDE