Discrimination divides, struggle unites!

The cost of the destruction and misery caused by the one-man regime has been increasing by day. The pandemic management that has been sacrificed to greedy bosses’ profit-making from day one resulted in more than 50 thousand deaths according to official figures. Due to the uncontrolled lifting of pandemic restrictions in expectation for revenues from tourism, the number of Covid cases has recently increased again, putting the re-opening of educational institutions in danger.

The “social pandemic” that accompanies the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc on workers. Workers who saw wage decreases, those who lost their jobs entirely, or the small business owners who couldn’t run their business as usual for months have all been trying to survive on personal loans with high-interest rates. The rate of use of personal loans as well as the rate of credit card debts increased by 37 percent within the last year, exceeding 700 billion liras. The only solution that the Palace regime offers in the face of this situation is incentivizing further individual borrowing. Even worse, the Palace continues to transfer tens of billions of dollars from the treasury to its “gang of five,” while proposing an increase in wages in accordance with the official inflation rate during the yearly collective bargaining agreement process concerning hundreds of thousands of workers, millions of civil servants, and retirees, even though the official inflation rate lags much behind that of real inflation.

The People’s Alliance, in full awareness that it has been losing its social support, accelerates its politics of polarization and repression. In addition to the systematic attacks against the HDP, the spreading news about lynchings against Kurds occurring in various cities in the recent days reveal that the regime is now spreading racism using all kinds of methods. Added to this are the politics of demonization of LGBTI+s, which aims at suppressing different sexual orientations and silencing all opposition groups.

Within this context, the topic of the day has lately been the situation of Afghan refugees. A xenophobic and racist campaign was organized against Afghan refugees, especially through social media, when they had to leave their homes due to the civil war in Afghanistan and the advance of the Taliban and started crossing the Turkish border in numbers. This campaign was immediately endorsed by the Bolu Mayor of the CHP, a politician known with his racist stance, through certain statements he made. Although some voices rose from within the CHP condemning his racist statements, others from the party chose to back them up. Kılıçdaroğlu himself, for instance, declared that they would “send the Syrians to their homes in peace” without specifying how exactly they plan to do so.

So, it seems that the National Alliance parties are also seeking to increase their votes by playing their cards on xenophobia. The source of the problems for us, the workers and the oppressed, is not refugees who are forced to flee from their countries due to wars and dictatorship regimes, but capitalism and the governments that sustain it. Those who do not ever speak out against imperialist occupations, against dictatorship regimes, against bosses who use immigrants as source of cheap labor, against the EU that made Turkey into its border guard, or against the AKP’s hypocritical and pragmatic immigration policy, prefer to fuel xenophobia by targeting refugees instead. All class organizations should raise their voice against xenophobia, all unions should develop policies to include immigrants who are part of the working class, and the socialist movement should stand against racism and expose the hypocritical refugee policies of the EU and the AKP.

As the one-man regime weakens, so do accelerate the efforts of both the People’s Alliance and other establishment parties to divide and separate us, the workers and the oppressed, based on our identities. We must unite our struggles to nullify these efforts and to reach at our common dream of having conditions of living that befit human dignity and a new order that is free of oppression and exploitation.