Defeat Turkish state repression

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*Against state repression! Smash the fascist bands!

*Break from the RPPFor a united front of workers organisations!

*For a workers' and peasants' government in The fascist attacks on the Turkish working class have reached a new stage with the assassination of the MADENIS metal workers' union leader Kemal Turkier, founding member of DISK.

Following spontaneous strikes by MADEN-IS members, the DISK leadership's response to the outrage was to call a 24hour strike. By restricting through this action any possible developments of independent struggle by the working class, the reformist and Communist Party of Turkey leadership once more act in vain to protect the remnants of bourgeois democracy and with it their own heads.

Behind the political crisis of parliamentary rule, and the stalemate of the presidential elections, lie the effects of the deepening world capitalist crisis on the ruined Turkish economy.

Astronomic levels of inflation, throwing the banking system into chaos, and a quarter of the population unemployed, has forced the Turkish ruling class further into the arms of imperialism and • its credit agencies, who exploit this situation to further their counterrevolutionary strategy in the The destruction of the Shah's regime in Iran has forced imperialism to find new gendarmes through which it can maintain its weakened authority in the region. For NATO, Turkey's role today therefore takes on a greater importance. - In addition, US President Carter's new cold war anti-Soviet policies means the Pentagon generals step up their military collaboration with their Turkish counterparts.

Turkish workers and peasants must now confront a ruling class desperate to impose its rule by new means.

Increasingly it is not to parliament but the police, army and to the fascist bands on the streets that the bourgeoisie now turns.

Yet the working class shows again and again its willingness and ability to defend itself from these attacks.

From the barricades built by TARIS workers in Izmir a few months ago to the continuing armed defence of Corum against fascist provocation today, resistance is strengthening to martial law and the increasingly paralysed Demirel government.

In the East the oppressed Kurdish peoplé, inspired by their successes in the armed struggle for independence in Iran, remain a major obstacle to the military and fascist leaders' plans for dictatorship.

With whole areas of Turkey now beyond its control, the Ankara government's attempts to impose its authority in the left-wing town of Fatsa confirm the increasing drive towards civil war.

Yet still the fate of the Turkish masses remain tied to bureaucratic leaders who use anti-imperialist and anti-fascist demagogy as a cover for maintaining their class collaboration with an illusory 'democratic' section of the bourgeoisie.

Under these conditions no reliance can be placed on, or strategic alliances tolerated with Ecevit's bourgeois Republican Peoples Party pretenders. • The defence of democratic rights cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution itself.

Only through a united front of workers' organisations and workers' militias behind which can be rallied the Kurds and the proletariat's petty bourgeois allies, can the reactionary offenbe defeated and the basis laid for the construction of a mass revolutionary communist Ecevit

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SArIALIST PRESS, Wednesday July 1980