Soma, Ermenek, Yirca: Can Anti-Coal Activists Defend Coal Miners and Olive Farmers?

[\"Food system change, not climate change\" banner at COP15 Climate Justice March, Copenhagen, 2009. Photo by the author.] [\"Food system change, not climate change\" banner at COP15 Climate Justice March, Copenhagen, 2009. Photo by the author.]

Soma, Ermenek, Yirca: Can Anti-Coal Activists Defend Coal Miners and Olive Farmers?

By : Ethemcan Turhan

The coal-mining town of Soma in the western Aegean region of Turkey hardly made headlines until last May. A mining disaster that took the lives of 301 mine workers in Soma on 14 May 2014 brought forward the country’s fragile mix of social injustice, lack of occupational safety, and a fossil-fuel-dependent energy policy. This was by no means the first time that miners had died in a coal pit several hundreds of meters beneath our feet. Indeed, as İş Güvenliği Meclisi reports, 1,235 workers were killed while working in 2013, ninety-three of whom were from the mining sector. Many more followed in the months preceding the Soma disaster. Yet what further made Soma a tragedy was the scale of devastation in a formerly well-established tobacco farming community, where many households had turned to coal mining for a living following the neoliberal reforms introduced after 2001. The cold-blooded response of state authorities, with high-ranking officials unapologetically engaging in physical and judicial violence, added insult to injury. Despite former Prime Minister (now President) Erdoğan’s futile attempts to compare the gravity of the situation with that of mining accidents elsewhere a century ago, Soma will likely remain as one of the cornerstones in contemporary Turkey’s capitalistic hall of shame.

Yet it hardly stopped there. In October, the bodies of eighteen workers were recovered after a grueling thirty-eight days in in a privatized mine in Ermenek. Kolin Holding, one of the recent shining stars on the clientelist Turkish construction/energy scene, downed six thousand olive trees overnight in order to build a coal-fired thermal power plant in the village of Yırca, just a stone’s throw away from Soma. These three events brought forth the fact that there is something very rotten in the Republic of Turkey in an age of unchecked authoritarian neoliberal developmentalism. Against such a backdrop, one wonders, can anti-coal activists across the country, in spots as diverse as Bartın, Aliağa, Karabiga, Şırnak, and Samsun, among others, defend coal miners and olive farmers alike? Would it be possible for these communities to mobilize both for public health and climate justice beyond NIMBY’ism (not-in-my-backyard)?

With oil prices plummeting, placing fiscal burden on oil exporting countries, the transition to a low/zero-carbon economy remains wishful thinking unless we stop relying on the markets to do the job for us. Although Minister of Finance Mehmet Şimşek seems to rejoice over falling oil prices, Turkey’s growth-at-any-cost policy is not immune to changes in the global markets. Imported natural gas makes up more than forty percent of Turkey’s electricity production. Although the share of fossil fuels in the country’s energy mix could be dramatically decreased with proper policy preferences, thanks to the country’s favorable geographic and climatic position, Turkey’s obsession with a fossil-fuel-driven developmentalism leads it to increasingly turn to coal in order to allegedly reduce its dependency on energy imports. All this happens against a background where energy demand is not even expected to grow at the pace estimated by the government.

In order to provide a bit of context on the current state of affairs, one has to revisit the political economy of energy and environment in Turkey. This is most visible in official statements. On 6 November 2014, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu announced the government’s new economic program, which included provisions for an imminent socio-ecological crisis. Davutoğlu announced that his cabinet will finalize legislative arrangements to facilitate mining activities by Turkish companies on foreign soil by December 2015, promote local production of hydro-power turbines above 50MW, boost coal-fired thermal power plant projects in all lignite zones until the end of 2015 via public-private partnerships, and also work to reduce the scrap dependency of the iron-steel sector for raw materials (which translates to no less than an extractivist boom). Despite the government’s push to boost domestic coal-fuelled energy production capacity, a good portion of coal-fired thermal power plants in the country are already running on imported coal, which does not decrease dependency in any way. Moreover, according to the findings of a new report, the cost of Turkey’s transition to renewables can go head-to-head with the anticipated investments in coal to produce the same amount of electricity by 2030. Yet the energy policy preferences reflect Turkey’s ambitions to be a “global energy hub” as well as to be a key geopolitical player, a caring brother for neighboring countries (a dream that failed miserably with the rise of Arab Spring). Hence, it is not only about dependency, but also about the development model.

On top of all this is the recent climate change summit (COP20) in Lima, Peru. Turkey, a latecomer to the game, has so far hid itself by delaying its reporting commitments and by abstaining from committing to anything beyond mere rhetoric of “special circumstances” as a developing country. While the negotiating partners struggle to produce a binding climate agreement next year in Paris, Turkey’s hesitant stance on climate change can also be read as a manifestation, not of its ignorance, but its clear apprehension of what real action on climate change entails. This resonates with the case that Naomi Klein eloquently presents in her new book This Changes Everything. Politicians and bureaucrats in Turkey are not at all dismissive, but aware of the fact that the moment they admit the scale of urgency, “they will lose the central ideological battle of our time,” as Klein writes, since this will call for a bold decision on “whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.”

In trying to prevent man-made disasters like those in Soma and Ermenek, which demonstrate sharp class divisions, uneven political power relations, environmental injustice, and developmentalist rhetoric at the expense of rural livelihoods, many rapidly turn to the possibility of a re-nationalization of what had been previously privatized. Nonetheless, as Deniz Yıldırım, Stefo Benlisoy, Begüm Özden Fırat and Fırat Genç are quick to remind us, nationalization or expropriation by the state does not automatically guarantee that these energy facilities would be working for the common good of the society. In this sense, rather than nationalization, we should strive for “commoning and decentralizing energy systems for a better, equal, and fair life for all. This will inevitably entail scrutinizing the core political and economic tenets of our contemporary world system. The global climate justice movement probably provides the best place for this scrutinization by bringing together “environmentalism of the poor” from the global South side-by-side with “degrowth” movements from the global North, to deal with this task, as described by Klein:

Not surprisingly, the people who understand this best are those whom our economic model has always been willing to sacrifice. The environmental justice movement, the loose network of groups working with communities on the toxic front lines of extractive industries—next to refineries, for instance, or downstream from mines—has always argued that a robust response to emission reduction could form the basis of a transformative economic project. In fact the slogan long embraced by this movement has been “System Change, Not Climate Change”—a recognition that these are the two choices we face.

Reflecting on the notion of “system change, not climate change,” the intertwined stories of Soma, Ermenek, and Yırca raise some key questions: What kind of a society do we want to live in? How will we produce, share, and use energy? What are we aiming to achieve with the use of energy? Are we still sticking firmly to the worn-out idea that more energy consumption equals more development, or can we rise to the challenge of imagining something new, bold, and different? Are we ready to challenge the notion of “development as economic growth” once and for all? And isn’t it time that we acknowledge that energy and climate justice in practice means “energy access for those who do not have it; justice for those who work within and are affected by the fossil fuel economy?” Isn’t it time to dismantle a fossil fuel economy that continuously produces social and environmental injustice?

In sum, let me get back to the initial question, which is whether or not anti-coal activists can defend coal miners and olive farmers alike. The answer is an emphatic yes. Neither coal miners nor olive farmers have better support than from those social and ecologist movements that understand social justice and environmental justice to be two sides of the same coin. It is only through these movements, which have the leverage and capacity to link local rural struggles against the dispossession of agricultural communities, urban struggles against the wholesale destruction of urban commons, and global struggles that strive to protect the biggest planetary commons like our climate system, that a true change will arrive. It is only through transforming visions from NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) to NIABY (not-in-anybody’s-backyard) that this change will arrive. This transformation is happening, here and today: coal miners from Soma and olive farmers from Yırca visited thermal power plant workers on strike in Yatağan, a key ecological sacrifice zone in southwestern Turkey. Just look at how those hands that dig for coal in Soma and those hands that pick olives in Yırca came together with the hands of those who brought coal-fired power to a halt in their struggle against privatization in Yatağan. You will then understand.   

[The author wishes to thank Leyla Amur for her rigorous editing of a previous version of this text.]

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]