BY VANNESSA HEARMAN
MELBOURNE — Dr Fikret Baskaya is a 63-year-old Turkish intellectual who has been imprisoned twice for criticising the strategy of the Turkish state in dealing with the issue of Kurdistan. Baskaya spoke at packed public meetings in Sydney and Melbourne organised by the Anatolia Cultural Centre in June.
Head of the Turkish Free Universities, a progressive non-formal education and research institute in Ankara, Baskaya is also the author of eight books on history and developmental economics. His doctorate thesis was on the impact of Soviet planning on the Cuban economy. He told Green Left Weekly that it was this research that helped him realise the importance of democracy to socialism: "Without it, socialism won't work".
In 2001, Baskaya was jailed for one year under Turkey's "anti-terrorist" laws for "disseminating separatist propaganda through the press". He had written an article in 1999 criticising the heavy-handed, militarist approach the Turkish state uses against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), following the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Baskaya stated that the Turkish state could not continue to use repression against the Kurds and to deny the existence of the Kurdish people as a nation.
The article was published at a time when the Kurdish movement for self-determination was reaching a peak. Baskaya said, grimacing, "The timing was not good".
During his incarceration, Amnesty International took his case up as one of AI's "prisoners of conscience". He was freed on June 29 last year.
Prior to this, Baskaya had been dismissed from his university teaching post in 1994 after serving a 20-month prison sentence for his book Bankruptcy of the Paradigm, which examined Turkish history and development.
He wrote that "modernisation theory", which continues to be promoted by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, had failed in Turkey. The theory presumes that countries pass through linear stages of development towards a "take-off" stage and that reasons for underdevelopment are to be found within those underdeveloped countries. Reliance on external capital (in the form of loans) and the private sector is also a characteristic of modernisation theory's "prescriptions".
Baskaya appeared in a Turkish court again on July 10, for "anti-terrorist" offences related to the same book.
Baskaya noted that the European Court of Justice has ruled that Turkey's anti-terrorist laws contravened international human rights principles. While the government has amended the laws, Baskaya told GLW, in reality the offending provisions have simply been "moved" to other laws. He said his court case will be a good opportunity to expose the Turkish regime's repressive and anti-democratic nature, though there was a real chance he would have to serve another prison sentence.
Baskaya said that the opposition to the military-backed Turkish regime needed to be more united and stronger. Since the 1980s, the regime had carried out a pro-Western agenda, with spiralling foreign debt and a burgeoning military budget. "There is only a veneer of democracy, for the sake of 'fitting in' the European Union, but in reality, the Turkish political parties are simply 'contractors', delivering what the West wants in the Middle East."
However, Baskaya predicted that there would be vehement opposition from the Turkish people should the US attempt to invade Iran.
Baskaya's Turkish Free Universities (also called the Turkey and Middle East Foundation) was set up in 1992, "to try to correct the very Eurocentric state of political theory in Turkey". Baskaya said one of the institute's aims was to take part in the anti-globalisation struggle, as well as to "promote socialism as a viable political alternative again".
From Green Left Weekly, August 6, 2003.
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