For the Book of Ragıp Duran ''Exiled in Thessaloniki'' Leonidas Karakatsanis The vanguard of self-criticism

Ragıp Duran's book begins, (through Stelios Kouloglou's introductory text) with the story of a friendship: the friendship of Ragıp and Stelios as young journalism students in Paris in the late 1970s.

This story, however, is more than just a private affair. On the contrary, it is a reflection of the history of the broader collective efforts for "Greek-Turkish Friendship from below": The beginning of its thread lies precisely in those small friendly vanguards of Greek and Turkish left intellectuals, students, workers and artists who meet in Europe in the '70s (in England, France, Germany) and react to the intolerance and nationalism that "divided" them. ^[1] The strengthening of these Greek-Turkish networks based on the different versions of socialism that different groups follow (with distinct networks being those of Maoists, Trotskyists, etc.), intensified after the wave of refugees from Turkey to Greece in the 1980s.

Then, in the 1990s, the new meeting ground of Greek and Turkish leftists became the question of Kurdish rights in Turkey. It is characteristic that in the case of Duran and Kouloglou, the trial and conviction of the former for an article on the Kurdish issue will become the starting point for an ephane-activation of their friendly networks as disolidarity networks now (with Stelios Kouloglou's documentary My Friend Ragip, which we watched on the night of the book presentation in Thessaloniki).

After the earthquakes of 1999 and the emergence of a generally positive climate in Greek-Turkish, many of these first generations of pioneers turned to Greek-Turkish civil society organizations, in which many participate dynamically. The increase in numbers and the latter's successes in shaking negative stereotypes between Greeks and Turks also brought the feeling—somewhere in the mid-2000s—that the great battles against intolerance and for democracy had brought significant victories on both sides of the Aegean. Many felt that their role had come full circle and they could now withdraw from these Greek-Turkish networks. And Turkey seemed to have embarked on a path of democratization where, as I will mention below, claims for rights had found space for political expression. Solidarity with Turkish democrats and Kurdish comrades seemed less compelling.

Certainly—and unfortunately—the last decade has overturned this treaty. Since the repression of the Gezi Park protests of 2013, Erdogan's nationalist turn to the Kurdish issue in 2015, and his extreme authoritarianism after 2016 that followed the failed coup against him, the persecution of Turks and Kurds has reactivated these forgotten networks of solidarity. who derive their genealogy (even if younger people don't know it) in those friendships and pioneers of the '70s). This is how Ragıp Duran finds himself writing articles since 2017 for Stelios Kouloglou's TVXS, when he is forced due to persecution by the Erdogan regime to exile himself from Turkey and settle in Thessaloniki.

But why was this vanguard of the Left in the field of Greek-Turkish rapprochement and what is its relationship with Duran's book?;

The main point of coincidence of Greek and Turkish leftists has been their encounter as people who had two basic characteristics: First, at critical moments, they had the courage to be self-critical and reflective about their national self and their state. Second, they shared a common past of persecution by the state which in the past both Greece and Turkey turned against its own citizens who dreamed of a fairer, more democratic tomorrow.

And this is where the thread begins, and the heart of Ragıp Duran's book, as a self-critical of this national self and the state, historical-political as well as cultural reflection.

The book is divided into thematic sections that focus, in order of appearance, on Turkish domestic politics and authoritarian rule in recent years, foreign policy, the Kurdish issue, the media in Turkey today, Greek-Turkish issues, and closes with a gleaning of the representations of Ragıp Duran himself from the Greece that hosts him.

Ragıp Duran's book is for the most part a collection of his weekly articles from 2017 to 2023 on TVXS. Duran's articles gathered in one volume are essentially an X-ray, an imprint of socio-political memory of this period, and this fact constitutes the first major contribution of the book to the Greek bibliography.

What is the significance of the separate depiction of this period during which Duran writes from Greece for TVXS as a consequence of his forced self-exile?

The period after the July 2016 coup attempt is perhaps the darkest period in terms of Turkey's formal structural political makeup in the last 70 years.

It is not that there have not been other periods in Turkey when democracy has been badly wounded or deeply undermined, quite the contrary, the most recent example being the erstwhile deep state in the 1990s. It is no coincidence that Ragıp Duran himself carries on his shoulders a prison sentence from 1998 for his journalism on the Kurdish issue.However, in 2017-2023 the logic of Turkey's erstwhile deep state becomes the official logic of the state. The Erdoğan state, which had already turned to a growing authoritarianism since 2013, is turning against all its potential enemies by lumping together opposition academics, journalists and teachers with coup plotters, and fundamentalists of the Islamic State and Kurdish rights activists on the other.

Of course, the old and brutal logics of the deep state are being smoothed out at this time. Assassinations by anonymous hitmen (who stirred up human rights organizations in the 1990s) have been replaced by character assassinations, by social deaths of thousands of dismissed workers who cannot even be hired as manual workers because of fear of employers, by lengthy lawsuit proceedings and endless trials aimed at political inactivation, or the impulse into self-exile. As Duran aptly repeats in his book through the examples he gives us, Turkey became a country where the rule of law had simply disappeared from the legal-political map.

Even heavier, however, is the fact that in the period 2017-2023 there is a savage refutation of the hopes and dreams that had been cultivated in the previous period for a democratic Turkey. The twenty years of power of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) began with democratic dreams, and primarily with the opening of a space of claim and hope. An area that was indeed opened by the AKP with the reforms of the first four years 2002-2006 against the so-called "Kemalist" deep state of army/services. But hope was not spared by this regime. The hopes were claimed and won through democratic 'battles' by brave people and social groups leading to the consolidation of a series of rights:

Such as the right to speak out about the heavy past of intolerance and nationalist violence in the country, against the official national narrative, as happened when Turkish left and liberal intellectuals organized commemorations for September '55 in 2005 or launched in 2008 a petition for an "apology to the Armenian People" for the genocide of 1915.

Like LGBTI rights that came to the fore in a conservative country like Turkey, with the movement reaching the almost unbelievable milestone of organizing, in 2008, one of Europe's longest running and participating Pride. Such as the rebirth of the feminist movement, the rights to language and identity for the Kurdish population, the call for peace and a solution to the Kurdish question.

All these were promising processes that mobilized everyone, despite the political framework of power of AKP and Erdogan himself, which showed already in 2007 his authoritarian and conservative choices.

What changes in 2017-2023 is how hope almost fades.

And this does not mean that during this period some people did not continue to assert vigorously, courageously and selflessly the protection of legality and democracy. And these brave expressions Duran will refer to in the book. Just because hope is faltering doesn't mean they haven't appeared in democratic victories since then (such as the opposition's electoral victories in the country's major municipalities in 2019 that brought a crack to its absolute dominance nationalist-conservative bloc).

However, the main problem of 2017-2023 was that the sense that the great struggle for democracy and the rule of law had been lost was now evident. Hope, an active mobilizing political force, gave way to a passive wish that something, perhaps, one day, will happen and things will change. We see this passive wish several times appearing in the concluding sentences of Ragıp Duran's writings. The replacement of hope by a wish was essentially also an acceptance that in Turkey society is trapped under a regime that has all the characteristics of a dictatorship with the exception of the electoral process.

 

The X-ray of authoritarianism

So I come back to the importance of the book. Ragıp Duran's book is published at a special time in early December 2023. It is a moment in which the Erdogan regime seems to be forced to make a series of overtures, for a variety of reasons, primarily economic but also geopolitical, and seems compelled to seek a broader international legitimacy. The tragic situation in the economy shows that legitimization through an intolerant populism at home, And through risky maneuvering in foreign policy is not enough. A series of changes in Turkey attest to this.

As of spring 2023, a significant number of the dismissed academics of 2016 (the so-called signatories/imzacélar who were expelled because of their criticism of Erdogan's violent turn on the Kurdish issue in 2015) have returned to their posts by court decisions (decisions within a judicial system that remains controlled and therefore would not make overtures on its own without orders from above). Erdogan's recent visit to Athens December 7, 2023 also attested to a significant shift in rhetorical/symbolic level of Erdogan's foreign policy choices, perhaps opening up the possibility for a return to the point where relations with Greece had left off in the mid-2000s, when the dynamics of earthquake rapprochement and diplomacy had been allowed to freeze (mainly at Greek fault at the time).

Without all of the above meaning that things cannot be diverted again, we can only take as important the possibility that we are facing a "turn" of the regime. Is it or will it be a turn of the regime like Ismet İnönü who in 1946 found that international treaties could no longer support the old one-party system and totalitarian policies that the state had pursued in the decade 1935-45 from the Dersim massacre to the Wealth Tax of 1942, or of the Spain type, which would follow after an orderly change of leadership? Is Erdogan himself, entering his last term as president, thinking more about his historical image than about direct political gain?

We can only respond with a 'maybe' at this time.

However, what matters, and I also connect it with the importance of Ragıp Duran's book, is that the period after 2016 and until today in Turkey, with the upsurge of nationalism, intolerance and popular legitimization of the authoritarianism of the great leader, with the violent restoration of the image of the Kurdish as the great enemy of the nation, With the diffusion of a megalomania in foreign policy (from marginal in the past), it will, unfortunately, leave its imprint on Turkish society and politics for years.

Ragıp Duran's book thus comes as a historical as well as sociological imprint of this period to sharpen our memory of what happened, but also to offer apt and reflective explanations for the phenomenon of the authoritarian neo-sultan as often referred to by Erdogan by Duran. These connections, which Duran often makesIn his writings they try to highlight that the Erdogan phenomenon should not be seen as a parthenogenesis but as a resurgence of authoritarian practices that have been inscribed in the context of a genealogy of Turkish-Islamic nationalism.

Duran's articles on every topic he discusses, put a historical context and are the touch of the author himself in the search for this genealogy of state practices he describes.

The part of the book that offers this framing with great aptitude is the one that deals with the Kurdish question (an issue that Duran has dealt with as one of Turkey's pioneering journalists). From the beginning of the book, it becomes obvious that for him, the violent management of diversity and diversity in Turkey is a chronic blow that marks Turkey's history. From reading his writings Duran on the Kurdish issue is not only the general public with an interest in Turkey but also the specialized scientists who have to gain

Elsewhere in the book, Duran appears prophetic, in their article on the Izmir earthquake (2020) he identifies the problems of "absolution" of planning violations, the treatment of disasters by the pro-government conservative-Islamic media as "godsends", but also the active mobilization of civil society called to manage the disaster. The tragic irony is that we have seen all this repeated again unfortunately in magnification in February 2023 with the major earthquakes in the southeast of the country.

 

When the self-critical gaze is exposed to the 'other'.

I think that always in order for a presentation to have value it must include and have a critical look at things. And the main question that came to mind when reading Ragıp Duran's book in Greek was: how will Greeks read/understand it?

The question, to put it more generally, is how a self-critical narrative towards the national self is perceived when it becomes accessible to the 'other' side. So how does the self-critical view of a Turkish leftist, progressive fit into the Greek narrative about Turkey? Perhaps there are some dangers in this 'exposure' of the critical self to the 'other'?

I believe that dangers exist and have appeared in the past when Greek society was called upon to admonish a critical perspective towards the Turkish state by translating it on its own terms. A prime example is the Kurdish issue, which began as a matter of solidarity between Greeks and the Kurds of Turkey in the early 1990s, but often ended up becoming a vehicle for Greek nationalism and the logic of "the enemy of my enemy, my best friend". We saw many times the Kurdish issue being "contracted" in Greece by people who had little feeling for "minority rights", for forbidden languages.

Let's look at it the other way around. Because Turkish nationalists like to glean lines (and usually not the whole context) from voices in Greek academia who have the courage to speak self-critically about Greek-Turkish relations like Alexis Heraklidis or about history like Tassos Kostopoulos.

Ragıp Duran, in the context of this reflective self-critical look, writes several times in the book about the "evils of the Turks" in search of continuities and genealogies in authoritarian practices, but he writes it first self-critically, in terms of a part of a political culture and tradition that is his own. Secondly, he writes it with a deep awareness of the multiple nuances, The resistance to extreme conservative Islam and authoritarianism that has a historical depth in the country that goes back to the mid-19th century.

Is there any danger here? Yes, there is. The danger is that the Greek reader, in the absence of this sense of nuance, will see in this X-ray of Turkish society that his negative stereotypes are simply confirmed. And his response after reading to be: "look... the Turks are 'so'", "look... since Erdogan's authoritarianism stems from the past, the Turks have it in their DNA", and "look, since Erdogan is even for a Turk so 'bad' he is obviously wrong in everything (and therefore we, the Greeks, are equally right in everything when issues of a Greek-Turkish nature are raised)".

So if I have a friendly and internal criticism to articulate, it is that the protective exile in Thessaloniki titled in the book has embraced Ragip Duran, to the extent that it sometimes offers an idealized image of the side from here, which leads him to presuppose a critical Greek reader as his reader.

Are we really "a little more civilized, and certainly more democratic" here in Greece as Duran writes on the first page of the book? Probably not... would say the correspondingly self-critical Greek observer, and the word "communism" is not accepted with positivity in the majority of the Greek population as he writes on page 206.

I conclude by stressing that this danger to which I refer cannot be completely averted, and will always exist when the self-critical gaze travels, as it should, between themselves and others. The solution, perhaps, to limit this risk, is simple: framing. The place through which an opinion will be expressed, always colors, sets the tone for the way a testimony of knowledge should be interpreted, but—in the case of Ragıp Duran's writings—also a testimony of the soul.

The fact that Ragıp Duran writes for TVXS and publishes with ENEKEN is this guarantee of specification that makes him right when he writes with a critical Greek reader in mind. Although, of course, as poststructuralist thought has shown us, the written text begins a journey from its publication onwards without the author any longer controlling it, The framing I mention may act as a life jacket, which the text 'wears' to float in the storms of the battles of reinterpretation.

Source.

Karakatsanis, L. (2014). Turkish-Greek relations. Rapprochement, Civil society and the politics of friendship. Routledge.

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^[1] See Karakatsanis, L. (2014). Turkish-Greek relations. Rapprochement, Civil society and the politics of friendship. Routledge.