Anarchists and some Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) protesters promised to clash with police on the 2019 May Day demonstrations. And they did. The unions accused police of attacking some of their members, even though they were clearly identified.
Police fire teargas as the march draws to a close. Photo: Tony Cross
As usual, France’s trade unions failed to march together on May Day, the self-styled “reformist” unions marching in the morning, the more militant CGT, FO and other smaller organisations in the afternoon.
Neither the unions nor the Gilets Jaunes are satisfied with President Emmanuel Macron’s response to the social unrest in the country. He organised a national debate to try to head it off and, like so many people these days, heard what he wanted to hear. Along with several other far from revolutionary measures, he has promised tax cuts, ignoring calls to restore a wealth tax that he axed early in his term of office.
The big political question of the day was whether the CGT, which belatedly declared its support for the Gilets Jaunes, in their anti-inequality guise at least, would manage to seal a solidarity pact with the diverse and poorly defined movement.
There were plenty of high-vis jackets on the Paris demo, although the turnout was not as high as the early Yellow Vest protests in Paris.
Perhaps influenced by the fact that the government only paid serious attention to their protests after shop windows were shattered on the Champs Elyées, some Gilets Jaunes joined anarchist groups in threatening to turn Paris into the riot capital of the world, a declaration that was seized on with relish by France’s macho interior minister, Christophe Castaner.
Some 7,4000 cops were put on the city’s streets, armed with water cannon, teargas and the controversial flashballs. Metro stations along the route of the demonstration and at other potential hot spots were closed.
Riot police with water cannon block a side street. Photo: Tony Cross
Police weaponry has deprived 22 people of an eye on Gilets Jaunes demonstrations. Ten people died on their demos last year, some as a result of road accidents at roadblocks.
There has also been violence on both sides on trade union demonstrations, such as the protests against the last government’s changes to labour law.
The government has angrily dismissed charges by a UN committee that excessive force has been used against demonstrations. Patriotic media pundits were indignant that their country was treated as if it was Venezuela or Iran or somewhere.
The government has introduced a law extending the authorities’ powers to police demonstrations, although its key proposal – giving wider powers to ban individuals deemed a danger to public order from attending – was struck down by the Constitutional Council.
The French police reportedly don’t bother to go to European Union meetings on developing crowd control methods.
Even if organisers call for calm, the battle lines are drawn, so far as many demonstrators are concerned. “Everybody hates the police!” is a popular chant in some sections of the May Day demo.
Demonstrators are blocked by police. Photo: Tony Cross
Not many people were shouting “Commit suicide!” this time, though. A 49-year-old unemployed cook was recently given an eight-month suspended prison sentence, ordered to do 180 hours community service and to pay 500 euros to two cops who had filed a case against him for shouting that on a Gilets Jaunes demo last month.
With Gilets Jaunes protests every weekend, frequent union demos, and social unrest in deprived areas, the police are overstretched. There have been 28 suicides in their ranks this year, the continuation of an upward trend.
Some protesters come well-prepared. This man appears to be a street medic. Photo: Tony Cross
Independent journalist Gaspard Glanz, who specialises in covering police violence, also appeared in court recently for giving the finger to a police officer. It is an alleged breach of France’s a law against “outrage“, broadly translatable as insulting behaviour, against a police officer.
At first Glanz was banned from attending demonstrations until his trial several months away. After an outcry, another court overturned the ban but the case against him is still pending.
Many reporters now go to demos in body armour, helmets and gas masks. Journalists’ organisations have complained that both police and protesters abuse them and prevent them doing their jobs, the cops sometimes confiscating equipment.
A young protester lights a flare as the march approaches its end. Photo: Tony Cross
According to reports, there were clashes at the start of the CGT May Day march.
As it approaches its destination, Place d’Italie, groups of youths become agitated, some throwing objects at the police line.
That’s when it kicks off. Police respond with teargas. Groups of black-clad youths – real or aspiring members of the infamous Black Bloc – run towards the trouble.
Teargas fills the air near Place d’Italie. Photo: Tony Cross
A group of men set about a rubbish bin, tearing it off the ground, presumably with the intention of hurling at the police lines.
As the teargas thickens, coughing and spluttering protesters rush away from the scene. Self-appointed “street medics” spray water in our faces and help a person who has crouched on the ground.
Police stop the march. Photo: Tony Cross
Further down the boulevard, riot police stop another part of the demonstration from advancing towards the trouble. Young protesters ask, “Shall we force our way through?”
At the end of the day the government says 38 people have been injured, 14 of them police officers, 33 of them in Paris.
The government says 151,000 people demonstrated across France, the CGT says 310,000. There were 16,000 on the Paris demonstration, according to the government; 80,000, according to the CGT; 40,000, according to a study commissioned by several news media outlests. At the time of writing, there have been 380 arrests, 330 in Paris.
To read a short history of May Day, written a while ago, click here
The French authorities are not exactly slow to spot a terror attack but they have said there is no evidence that the Notre Dame fire was caused by one. That hasn’t stopped the far right from hatching conspiracy theories. They just can’t help themselves.
Notre Dame viewed from the south, 16 April 2019. Photo: Tony Cross
“More and
more people agree with me,” claimed the ageing gent on the banks of the Seine
on Tuesday afternoon. He was part of the crowd looking at the damage done to
Notre Dame Cathedral in the previous night’s fire.
Having
blamed immigrants for the lack of affordable housing, he went on to express
scepticism about the “theory” that the fire had started by accident.
Indeed, he
is not alone.
Officials
and experts say there is no evidence of arson or a terror attack. The conflagration
is most likely to have been set off by an accident, possibly connected to
restoration work being carried out in the cathedral, they say. But that hasn’t
stopped the conspiracy theorists soaping the ropes for a prospective pogrom.
With
sickening predictability, far-right websites, known as the “fachosphere” in
France, launched a desperate search for evidence that the disaster was the
result of an Islamist terror attack.
Here are
some of their claims:
The two fires theory: A tweet by Pierre Sautarel of fachosphere favourite Fdesouche.com claimed there were two fires and therefore that they must have been started deliberately. As evidence, it cited well-known newsreader David Pujadas, who in a live broadcast did point out that there were two lots of flames, but without implying they had been started separately. That did not prevent other far-right fantasists, in France and abroad, from spreading the rumour.
The mysterious imam/Yellow Vest: A Spanish tweet claimed that a figure filmed walking along the side of the cathedral was there when the building was supposed to have been empty and must have been an imam or, failing that, a Gilet Jaune. As Libérationnewspaper established, the report was broadcast live on Spanish TV after emergency services had arrived and the figure was wearing a high-visibility jacket and safety helmet because, well, you would in those circumstances, wouldn’t you?
Well, look, it just must have been terrorists: All France’s main parties, even the party previously known as the Front National (FN), have abstained from claiming the disaster was a terror attack. Not the Islamophobes posing as secularism-defenders at Ripostelaïque, however. They declared that “inevitably, we’re all thinking it might be an attack on France and all that she stands for … And if it’s an attack it can only be a Muslim attack.” Philippe Karsenty, a right-wing councillor from the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly, won the distinction of being fact-checked by Fox News when he told an interviewer that the “politically correct will tell you it was an accident”. Perennial presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignon, an anti-tax obsessive who backed the FN’s Marine Le Pen in the 2016 second round, demanded an official inquiry “to know if it was a terror attack or not”. And vehemently pro-Israel MP Meyer Habib managed to combine both the above items of fake news in one tweet that asked “Accident or criminal attack?”, following it with another that indignantly denounced government ministers who have condemned conspiracy theories.
In today’s digital world fake news spreads before the truth has the time to put its boots on, so inevitably these and other unfounded rumours found their way to dodgy sites from Australia to America. In the US Alex Jones’s Infowarsgave a headline to a tweet that was soon deleted by its author, who told BuzzFeed News “I never should have tweeted it.”
The hate-mongers have had a little help, however. Two members of the national committee of the left-wing students’ union Unef gave them just what they wanted when they sneered at “some cathedral woodwork burning”, people “crying over some bits of wood”, one declaring that she “couldn’t care less about the history of France” and that the outpouring of emotion was white people’s ravings.
Police cordon off Notre Dame on Tuesday afternoon. Photo: Tony Cros
Conspiracy
theories also put in a brief appearance on the Gilet Jaunes’ social networks. Some
contributors judged it suspicious that the fire led to the cancellation of the
president’s address to the nation on prime-time TV. Macron was due to outline
his response to the national debate he organised in the wake of the high-vis
protests.
It’s
difficult to imagine the president declaring “Shit! I haven’t finished my
speech. Somebody set fire to Notre Dame!” and, knowing what we do about the
man, we can be fairly sure he was convinced of the brilliance of his proposals.
Gilet Jaune moderators seem to have shut down
those debates, in any case. And Macron’s main proposals have been leaked.
Surprise, surprise, he leads with tax cuts, which the prime minister has
already explained will mean more cuts in services. Not really worth setting a
national monument on fire for.
To listen to me talking to KPFA radio’s Kris Welch about the Notre Dame fire (including the strange story of the kings’ entrails), click here
The Democratic Socialist Congresswoman’s answer to well-heeled Republicans who claim that environmental concerns are “elitist” was inspiring. But …
Dear
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes,
You
probably won’t read this, which is fair enough, given that I’m an OWM living in
France who has never set foot in the US.
What’s
more, not only do I have zero influence on American politics, my influence over
the politics of the country where I was born (the UK) and the one where I now
live is pretty much zero, too. But then I have that in common with most
citizens of those countries.
Nevertheless, as a lifelong left-winger, I would like to say how encouraging it is to see a professed socialist elected to the US Congress and how impressed I was by your takedown of Republican sneers that concern over climate change is “elitist”.
But – you
knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you? – I must take issue with your
statement that climate change “should not be a partisan issue”.
Of course
many US politicians, and practitioners of other equally respectable professions,
are “more concerned about helping oil companies than helping their own
families”. Not only are they corrupted by lobbies, as you showed so effectively
in another gone-viral speech, but defending the rich and powerful is actually what
their politics is about.
True, in the long term climate change will threaten all human civilisation but capitalism is all about the short-term. Increasingly so, as Thomas Piketty has shown, with companies frittering away their own future by paying out bigger and bigger dividends to shareholders.
Furthermore,
interests that will in the long-run endanger the whole kit and caboodle of
humanity have become so entrenched they can dictate current policy.
And, let’s
be honest, politics, like human consciousness, is formed by the past, which is
a handicap when it comes to planning for the future.
I was
tempted to describe Sean Duffy’s remarks as “stupid crap” but it’s not, it’s
cunning and disingenuous crap designed to convince middle-class and
working-class people that their interests converge with those of big business
and its political, legal and media courtesans.
That’s what
their politics is about.
So climate
change, like everything else of any importance, is a partisan issue, although
the partisan divide may also appear within the Democratic Party.
This may
seem like nitpicking but in France we have an illustration of why it is
important to be clear about what are left-wing values and what are right-wing
ones.
Yellow Vests campaign on a market near Paris. Photo: Tony Cross
Starting as a reaction to a decree from on high that adversely affects the vulnerable, the kind of action your Green New Deal warns against, it has become a mass protest that is diffuse and difficult to define but essentially against inequality.
That’s a left-wing concern, right? Fighting inequality and eventually establishing a classless society is what socialism is all about, isn’t it?
Unfortunately,
not for many Gilets Jaunes. As one young activist told me the other day, the
experience of France’s Socialist Party in government, carrying out a pro-business
programme that has increased inequality and left many feeling ignored or
despised, has emptied the idea of socialism of its meaning for a large number
of the people it is supposed to be fighting for.
So, at the
same time as that young man outlined what seems to me a very clear-sighted
analysis, an older woman was declaring that the fight against inequality is
“above politics”.
In France
today the chattering classes have a tendency to throw around the terms left and
right without any reference to actual policies, as if they were tribal
loyalties. The disillusionment with that sort of politics is such that both
candidates in the final round of the last presidential election – one a
far-right hate-monger, the other a social liberal with a right-wing economic
programme – declared themselves to be neither on the left or right. (They are
also both millionaires, by the way.)
We on the
radical left used to think that after attempts to reform capitalism had failed
the masses would turn to us. It’s proved a little more complicated than that. Various
experiences of “socialists” and “communists” in office, as well as the arrogance
and callous indifference of EU bureaucrats and traditional politicians, have
led to a kind of anti-political demagogy that exploits disillusion and has
allowed xenophobic, far-right movements to grow in several European countries.
So I don’t
think we should make any concessions to the idea that because something’s
important it is non-partisan or not political.
Socialist
politics are about serving the interests of the majority and protecting the
future of all humanity.
I imagine
that’s why you took up the political cudgels.
We owe it
to our adversaries to refrain from distorting what they stand for. But we owe
it to humanity not to give them credit where credit is not due.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan was sworn in as Turkey’s president on Monday, assuming new powers that consolidate his power, already strengthened by post-coup purges and a long-running media clampdown. I covered June’s presidential and parliamentary election for RFI. Here’s what I found on my latest visit to Erdogan’s Turkey.
AKP voters welcome Erdogan to the rally in Eyüp Photo: Tony Cross
”So, are you going to say bad things about our president?” the young man asked, smirking.
He was part of a crowd gathered in the Istanbul district of Eyüp to see Erdogan on his eve-of-poll tour of the city.
The fact of being both a journalist and a foreigner is a guarantee of suspicion in a crowd of the president’s supporters – an indication of the mindset of many of the 26,324,482 who voted for him the following day, 24 June 2018.
In Eyüp the Muslim traditionalism can be seen in the women’s headscarves and long coats, the defensive nationalism makes itself heard in the mistrust of foreign media and the credulous acceptance of conspiracy theories, and the devotion to the leader in the rapturous cheers when he appears.
Waiting for Erdogan in Eyüp Photo: Tony Cross
A call to prayer echoing over the rally failed to put an end to proceedings, although Erdogan himself was careful to leave a decent interval before his appearance on stage.
But there is no denying his supporters’ attachment to their Islamic identity, in defiance of the cosmopolitan middle class that make up the bulk of supporters of Erdogan’s principal opponent, Muharram Ince, who turned out in vast numbers in Istanbul Ankara and Izmir.
Erdogan voters’ nationalism is less easily detected by the naked eye. But it, and an acute case of strong-leader syndrome, are key elements in his appeal.
Economic woes and conspiracy theories
Feeling the pinch – shoppers in Eminömü Photo: Tony Cross
The election result surprised me. Opinion polls had indicated shrinking support for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). That confirmed what I’d observed last year, when I covered the constitutional referendum: signs of discontent among taxi drivers and small businessmen – surely classic Erdogan supporters – over a worsening economic situation.
Despite growth of 7.5%, a full-blown crisis has developed, with 12% inflation, the lira tanking on the money markets and the current account deficit ballooning.
I should have made more attention to the interviews I did with shopkeepers in Istanbul’s Eminönü district a week before the election. They were feeling the pinch, especially if they sold imported goods, but most were still keeping the faith.
Sales are always down during Ramadan, which had just ended, some assured me, adding that once the uncertainty of the election had lifted business would look up.
And then there were the conspiracy theories.
“The reason is foreign powers,” audio equipment shop owner Muhammed Akcotoya insisted, echoing Erdogan’s own explanation. “They’re trying to harm Turkey. That’s why they’re making the dollar and the euro higher.”
We’re in the Middle East, whether the Ince crowd like it or not, so conspiracy theories abound on all sides. They did so long before algorithms put us all on a dripfeed of the fake news most suited to our susceptibilities and they show no sign of abating now.
Although the lira perked up after the election, the economic problems are unlikely to go away. So how long will AKP voters carry on making excuses for the leader?
Indefinitely in some cases, one supposes, but the wallet is a sensitive organ. An important part of the AKP’s social base is an Anatolian bourgeoisie that has done will during its years in power and may not look kindly on its living standards being squeezed.
The AKP has also won support for providing social benefits for the poor, whom the secular parties, including the “social democratic” CHP, neglected and often treated with contempt.
The underpriveleged, too, cannot all be expected to remain faithful if inflation continues to eat away at their living standards.
Describing the growth rate as artificially induced “hormonal growth”, economist Mustafa Sönmez told me he expected a slowdown in the second half of the year and predicted big trouble because of the current account deficit.
Fear of such problems was the reason Erdogan brought the election forward by more than a year, according to Sönmez and most other commentators, but the political manoeuvre may not spare him social unrest.
The uses of nationalism
Young men at the pro-Erdogan rally in Istanbul Photo; Tony Cross
The AKP’s religious inspiration is well-documented but its nationalist discourse receives less attention.
Anti-imperialist rhetoric is employed to deflect criticism, economic problems and embarrassing revelations are attributed to foreign plots, and nostalgia for the Ottoman era is invoked to inspire a dream of revived national glory.
Of course, this sort of demagogy is not unique to Turkey. It is increasingly employed by fundamentalist and majoritarian movements in India, Russia, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland … one branch of it is known as “what-aboutery” in Pakistan. The Turkish version means that the excesses of the state of emergency can be dismissed with the observation that France took a similar measure after the Paris attacks.
A foreign journalist gets fallout from this – in a far gentler form than our colleagues who have been arrested in successive purges of the media – not only in suspicion from the crowd at Erdogan rallies, but also in AKP MPs’ assurances that we wouldn’t be asking certain questions if we understood Turkey properly, or in police and other officials’ obstruction when we try to interview voters on polling day.
Is its virulence in Turkey, which doesn’t just concern AKP supporters, affected by the origins of the modern Turkish state – the expulsion of the Greeks – admittedly an echo of the Greeks’ expulsion of Muslims when they won independence from the Ottomans – the Armenian genocide, the persecution of the Alevis, and the denial of Kurdish identity and rights?
All-embracing Ince
The crowd hears Muharram Ince in Izmir Photo: Tony Cross
What about the opposition? Is Ince all he’s cracked up to be?
And, being the son of a farmer who became a physics teacher, he has a welcome common touch in a party seen as the mouthpiece of the cosmopolitan elite.
But what was he actually promising?
An end to the state of emergency, the arrests of thousands, the sackings of thousands more, a free media, to be sure. But what would he do for the ordinary Turks who support the AKP because it has given them access to health care, brought electricity and roads to their rural homes, or helped them set up small businesses?
Difficult to say, in particular because, in an effort to differentiate himself from Erdogan’s cronyism and represent “all Turks”, he proposed to form a government of all parties, including the AKP.
Perhaps he hoped such a proposal would further deepen divisions in the party but what policies could such a heterogeneous cabinet – which would also presumably include the hard-right Iyi Party of Meral Aksener, the MHP, which she split from, and the Islamists of Saadat – carry out?
“An excellent question,” according to former diplomat and CHP MP Osman Faruk Logoglu, who talked to me the day after the election. Triangulation can work for the right, he argues, but no necessarily for the social-democratic left, where he situates his party.
In fact, Ince’s support was also heterogeneous, attracting former MHP voters, attracted by his secular stance and seeing him as a viable alternative to Erdogan.
The secular parties are also pretty nationalist, the MHP and Iyi particularly, but the CHP as well.
Izmir may see itself as a progressive stronghold but it is also the port from which the Greeks were expelled after the war of independence.
The town is built around a bay, which is plied by ferries. Football fans taunt their rivals with threats to throw them into the sea “like Atatürk did to the Greeks”, I was told while I was there.
And several Izmiris expressed hostility to Syrian refugees, a hot-button issue that has aroused resentment and rumours similar to those now widespread in Europe. Like Aksener, Ince promised to send them home, insisting that reestablishing relations with President Bashar al-Assad would make this possible.
The HDP offices in Istanbul Photo: Tony Cross
Ince also attracted support from left-wingers, who voted for him as the candidate with most hope of beating Erdogan but for the left-wing pro-Kurdish rights HDP in the parliamentary elections.
That the HDP – whose leader Selahattin Demirtas contested the presidential election from jail much to Erdogan’s disgust at the election board’s “emotional” decision – managed to break the 10% barrier to holding seats in parliament is in part evidence of a radical left among young Turkish voters.
Several non-Kurdish young people told me they were backing Ince for the presidency and the HDP for parliament, in part because they believed the Kurds should have a voice in the country’s politics and in part because they support its progressive stance, which includes endorsement of LGBT rights and male-female parity in all posts, despite the social conservatism of some of the Kurdish electorate.
Turkey’s economic turbulence may mean political turbulence, regardless of Erdogan’s electoral victory.
The massive drilling machine, in place and ready to dig Line 15 of the Greater Paris metro Photo: Tony Cross
Saturday, 3 February 2018
On a drizzly Saturday evening in February I joined a queue of hundreds to trudge through the mud of a building site. Not just any building site. The Grand Paris Express, which will bring the metro to millions of residents in the French capital’s famous banlieue, is apparently Europe’s biggest construction project. It will transform towns like mine, perhaps in unforeseen ways. And it will provide a boost to the French economy that will have more tangible effects than the supply-side dogma of this and previous governments.
The view from the queue Photo: Tony Cross
At 7.00pm, under arc lights and with a commentary broadcast across the site, a gigantic boring machine was lowered into place in a deep Piranesian pit that will be the starting point for drilling line 15 of the Paris metro, which – starting in our town, Champigny-sur-Marne – will eventually encircle the whole of Paris.
Still waiting … but there’s some pretty impressive kit Photo: Tony Cross
At least, I think that’s what happened. I was stuck outside with a couple of hundred other would-be spectators because too many damn other people had already gone in.
But we did hear the applause and were allowed in afterwards to see the beast in its lair, try the limited-production local wine – a pinot noir and not bad at all at 7.30pm on a chilly night – and eat gigot de bitume (more of that later).
Immigration and the banlieue
The crowd, in free fluorescent jackets created for the occasion, takes a look at Steffie-Orbival Photo: Tony Cross
It was all rather moving – parents showing their children a moment in history, civilians marvelling at a triumph of engineering that is dedicated to the common good, and a feeling of being part of a community that binds people of various origins together.
Although I would say there was perhaps less variety than at the regular festivals our Communist-led local council puts on during the course of the year. Fewer Turks, Maghrebins and Sub-Saharan Africans, I would say, but plenty of Portuguese.
The Portuguese presence is appropriate, poignant even, since the park out of which the pit has been gouged was the site of France’s second-biggest shanty town in the 1960s and it was populated by Portuguese immigrants – some refugees from the Salazar dictatorship, many more economic migrants, a category that had not then acquired the stigma President Emmanuel Macron is working so hard to give it these days.
Site workers with Steffie Photo: Tony Cross
Up the hill from where we were milling stands a recently constructed, and extremely kitsch, monument to Louis Talamoni, the Communist senator and mayor of Champigny who fought for the immigrants to be decently housed.
Down the hill is the industrial estate where two cops were beaten and one of them kicked outside an unauthorised New Year’s Eve party in a warehouse, leading some right-wing smart-arses to compare the good Portuguese immigrants of yore to the bad banlieusards of today, blacks and north Africans, according to the caricature, although one doubts if they had carried out a demographic survey of the assailants.
Happily, that prompted a group of people of Portuguese origin to publish an open letter in Le Monde newspaper, objecting to being exploited for racist ends and pointing out that their community had not actually been a docile bunch of grateful paupers.
Lamb baked in tar – great French tradition
The gigot comes out of the bitume Photo: Tony Cross
Anyway, back to Saturday’s soirée because I bet you’re all dying to know about the gigot de bitume.
… And handed to an assistant … Photo; Tony Cross
This is one of those only-in-France things. It’s known as the menu de Sainte Barbe in honour of Saint Barbara, who, even though she may well not have existed, is the patron saint of miners and other people who work with explosives. She bears this distinction because her father is said to have been struck dead by lightning after carrying out the pagans’ order to execute her (by decapitation, if you want to know).
… and cut out of its wrapping Photo: Tony Cross
French secularism notwithstanding, the menu de Sainte Barbe is apparently traditional when civil engineering projects finish. It consists of a leg of lamb, well-wrapped and plunged into hot tar to cook, fished out, dunked in cold water, cracked open and served to the horny-handed sons of toil.
… and passed on to the serving team Photo: Tony Cross
We, several hundred of us, ate it on paper plates, accompanied by small potatoes. What did it taste like? Delicious, although not quite as meltingly tender as I had expected.
… and served to the hungry masses Photo: Tony Cross
We partook of our rugged repast in the shadow of a huge piece of machinery, one of the cutters of the digger, if I’m not mistaken, named Steffie-Orbival after a female digger driver who has muscled her way into the masculine world of civil engineering – or am I out of date here? – and suspended – the machine part not the driver – from a gigantic crane, to the delight of selfie-takers.
Then, finally, we could mount a gantry and look down 20 metres at the beast itself, slumbering still but ready to rip into the soil, cutting what will become Line 15 all the way around the capital.
Some pretty impressive stats
Steffie the heavy machine operator about to be snapped by the press Photo: Tony Cross
I’m going to get a bit breathless here:
Thirty such machines will dig 170km of tunnels, the longest underground railway in Europe.
This one will dig up the equivalent of eight pyramids of Giza.
There will be 68 stations, the deepest of which, next door to us at Saint-Maur-Créteil, will be 52 metres beneath the earth.
The finished network will comprise 200km of line, as much as the actually existing metro.
Above all, the Greater Paris project will be a long-overdue recognition of reality – the reality that Paris is not just the increasingly socially cleansed city of 2,250,000 inhabitants within its now-notional walls but also the less aesthetically pleasing sprawl around it that is home to seven million people.
Travelling on a commuter train into the city, you catch a glimpse of a nightmare of overcentralisation and overcrowding.
At rush hour on the line I take to work, RER A, there is a train every five minutes. That’s on a line that splits in two at Vincennes and more trains come in on the other fork. It’s a tribute to the network’s staff and the technology that there aren’t collisions. To get to the station, I have already crossed a road – rue Louis Talamoni, as it happens – which will be jammed by 8.00am. Our train takes us over a motorway packed with cars coming from the east, which connects with another equally packed motorway coming from the north and the ring road, which is in a more or less permanent state of congestion.
So the new lines are essential to reduce that congestion and the plague of pollution that goes with it. The Greater Paris project, when the politicians have finished squabbling over how it will be put into practice, should begin to tackle the division between Paris and its outskirts. On the downside, it may get in the way of a serious effort to decentralise France and repopulate deserted rural and semi-rural areas, which should surely be possible in the digital age.
Changes – social and political
Workers attend to the machinery after it has been put in place Photo: Tony Cross
Meanwhile, we home-owners are obviously all wondering what it is going to do to house prices. Push them up, presumably, which is good news if you’ve bought but not if you’re thinking of buying, but by how much and when? And what will that mean for our towns?
Champigny has already seen some small demonstrations of anxious home-owners because property developers are buying plots on residential streets to build blocks of flats for future commuters. The householders say that will spoil the tranquil ambiance of their streets>. One suspects they also fear it will affect the value of their properties.
The local council has drawn up a very necessary plan to revamp the scruffy town centre, probably the only Place Lénine in France. But the Communist Party, struggling to keep one of the last major local councils it controls, may also be getting nervous at the prospect of an influx of yuppies, which may account for their eagerness to build more social housing. Although, with a recent opinion poll finding that 83% of under-40s think that capitalism is a system that doesn’t work well, maybe they should be optimistic about the prospect of an influx of younger voters, so long as they do a bit of work on their image.
Public spending v tax handouts
How the Grand Paris Express should look Map: Hektor/Wikimedia Commons
There has been a glitch.
Entirely predictably, the Grand Paris Express will cost more than predicted. Much more. The estimate has gone up from 19 billion euros to 38.4 billion, which has given France’s top financial authority palpitations, committed as it is to the EU’s austerity-inducing target of reducing public debt to 3.0% of GDP.
Fortunately, the government is going against its own economic doctrine and maintaining the project, particularly since some of the lines are needed for when Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics. But there may be some cuts in expenses and some lines may open later than planned. Not ours, fortunately.
And it’s all paid for from our taxes! Which is a good thing. Grand Paris Express will improve people’s lives, be good for the environment, create useful jobs and boost the economy. In fact, when the latest statistics showed that France experienced its highest growth for six years in 2017, there was no real evidence that it was due to tax cuts, labour reforms and the election of a president the bosses adore. But there was a confident prediction that the massive public investment in this project will ensure that the trend continues.
So it’s a worthwhile investment for our collective benefit. That is why the continuous propaganda against taxes, which offers bribes to the majority to go along with huge givebacks to the rich, is so dangerous. It is to the shame of mainstream social democrats that they have gone along with this ideological assault on collectivism and their own legacy.
The majority of French voters have rejected Marine Le Pen. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the elected president is a free-market fanatic whose programme inspired a record number of people to cast blank votes.
Election posters in Champigny-sur-Marne on 7 May 2017 Photo: Tony Cross
Had Le Pen won the presidency, another country would have succumbed to the revamped right-wing populism represented by Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Brexit – not fascism, in my view, but a new kind of majoritarian authoritarianism endorsed by popular mandate, fuelled by fear of the future and resentment of the establishment, finding its expression in xenophobia and prejudice.
Emmanuel Macron could hardly be styled a courageous defender of minorities but he did resist Le Pen’s racism in the campaign TV debates, which is more than can be said for the mainstream right candidate François Fillon and, for that matter, more than can be said for Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls while in office.
So we’ve escaped a national-level version of the discrimination, repression and racist rabble-rousing the far right has let loose on the towns it controls. And Le Pen’s National Front (FN) seems to have big problems ahead.
Crisis for National Front
The result, and Le Pen’s disastrous performance in the few days before the poll, appears to have plunged the FN into crisis.
In one sense, they don’t have so much to complain about. They achieved a record 10.6 million votes, nearly double their score when Marine’s dad, Jean-Marie, made it to the second round against Jacques Chirac 2002. That’s a lot of Islamophobes – or, at least, a lot of people prepared to go along with the FN’s hatred of Muslims, immigrants, Roma and other minorities to poke the “elite” in the eye, which should, but won’t, give the “elite” pause for thought.
But, and this is really worrying, they could have done even better.
Le Pen ran an effective campaign up until the last few days. Then she had the bright idea of picking a holocaust-doubter as her party’s interim president (he also thought that beating up commies was a good political education but that received less media attention) say that France was not responsible for the wartime rounding up of Jews, call Fillon and his party “shits” (the FN claims she just said they were in the shit) and, worst of all, behave just like her father’s daughter during the crucial final TV debate.
The debate performance – where she was caught out lying, blustered, bullied, slouched and grimaced like the chip off the old block she is – has probably destroyed the “dedemonisation” strategy that had been working pretty well for Marine and her pals.
The FN’s canal historique is already sharpening its knives. Its best-known representative, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, one of only two FN-affiliated MPs at the moment, said on Sunday evening that the party must consider its strategy in the election after the “disappointment”.
And, if reports are to be believed, the rank and file is in disarray. An anonymous FN official told the Mediapart website that a the party’s post-debate postbag contained a number of torn-up membership. And the “fachosphere” – the far-right social media network – is full of recriminations, mostly against Marine Le Pen and Florian Philippot, the FN vice-president who’s seen as the Svengali behind the dedemonisation strategy and the party’s “social” turn.
One is tempted to ask whether Le Pen threw the debate deliberately. As a Trump admirer, she must have read his comment that leading a country is harder than he’d thought. Being the party of mean-minded, resentful opposition has been a profitable business for her family, making them millionaires. Had the FN watered down its opposition to the EU, the real point of difference with the Fillons, Sarkozys and other tough guys of the mainstream right, it could have undergone the same transformation as Italy’s MSI and joined a coalition government some years ago.
But no, the FN leaders were riding a wave of anti-establishment resentment mixed with xenophobia and seemed genuinely to believe they were on the road to power on their own terms. Hence the disappointment today.
It remains to be seen if the backbiting will hamper their campaign in June’s parliamentary elections. A good result there could staunch the crisis.
Macron and extremes
Something else revealed in that TV debate is that Macron is not a very skilful politician.
He’s an intelligent man, a skilled technocrat who knows his facts.
But Le Pen destroyed herself, he didn’t destroy her.
When she posed as a defender of gay and women’s rights during an attack on a Muslim group that supported him, he failed to remind her of her own party’s record on those questions – the potential for mockery was great but Macron doesn’t do funny. When she justified her claim that the wartime deportation of Jews was not France’s responsibility but that of the Vichy government, he let it go without even a mention the former collaborators who helped found the party. Apparently, he also doesn’t do history.
This is not just a historical quibble. Obscuring the party’s Nazi origins and airbrushing out its anti-Semitism are a key part of the dedemonisation strategy and Macron passed on an opportunity to deal it a powerful blow.
In short, Macron has no political culture, which is also the problem of his newly founded En Marche ! movement. Apparently, the political experience that his presidential campaign lacked was made up for by Socialist Party traitors, working against their own candidate, Benoît Macron, in the first round and even more openly for a republican front – nominally anti-fascist but in reality more pro-Brussels – in the second round.
That was also apparent in his speech after the result was announced. In what he imagined was an olive branch to supporters of Le Pen and left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he told them they had voted for “extremists”.
Repeating the old canard of the “extremes” meeting up is hardly a way to win over the seven million who voted Mélenchon in the first round and Macron’s assurance that he understood voters’ “anger, anxiety and doubts” is undermined by his obvious lack of empathy with ordinary people on the campaign trail.
With 25 percent abstention, the highest since 1969 when France’s youth was radicalised by May ’68, and an absolute record of four million blank votes, Macron can expect trouble.
His programme, for the most part a collection of micro-measures and expressions of good intentions, is ardently pro-EU and pro-capitalist. Despite a promise to revive Europe’s connection with “the people”, Macron is determined to press on with reducing the debt through austerity, the very policy that has done so much to help demagogues like Le Pen. On the economy it’s more of the same – tax cuts and subsidies for employers, in the desperate and so far unrewarded hope that they will be bribed to invest, longer hours, later retirement and less social protection for employees.
He has promised to bring in more changes to labour law in the summer, his main proposal being to encourage company-level negotiations on working hours and other conditions, a further undermining of collective bargaining and trade union solidarity.
Mélenchon’s seven million votes mean that, for the first time for years, the left is not demoralised.
Rather it is in combative mood, witness all those blank votes. So strikes, demonstrations and social upheaval are guaranteed, indeed the first took place on the afternoon after the election.
Parliamentary elections – who know what will happen?
It’s all very well winning the presidency but afterwards you have to form a government.
For someone who doesn’t actually have a real party that’s a problem.
And, with the mainstream parties rejected by voters in the presidential election, everything’s up for grabs in June’s parliamentary election.
Will Macron succeed in destroying the Socialist Party, as seems to be his intention, with his assurance that En Marche ! won’t endorse any candidate standing under another party’s colours?
Will the mainstream right Republicans lose their more liberal MPs, tempted by the prospect of ministerial positions?
Will voters be as ready to reject sitting MPs as they were to turn their backs on their parties’ candidates in the presidential first round?
Will the FN pick up MPs in some of the 95 constituencies where Le Pen won more than 30 percent in that round?
Can Mélenchon and his allies build on the presidential campaign success and win more seats?
I don’t know the answers to these questions and I don’t think anyone else does, either.
Which means that the parliamentary poll is going to be another cliffhanger and, whatever happens, French politics will never be the same again.
Read my analysis of the result for RFI English here
The result of Turkey’s referendum was a cliff-hanger, which I witnessed at the main opposition party’s HQ where accusations of fraud were flying. At the polls I saw the deep divisions in the country, No supporters’ disdain for government supporters, Yes supporters’ fury at European “crusaders” and adulation of President Erdogan.
Polling officials await voters in Ankara Photo: Tony Cross
Friday 14 April 2017, Ankara
On arrival in Ankara, where I will report on the voting and the result, I meet the young man who is going to be my fixer, Cagdas Ersoy (without the diacritical marks and the knowledge of what Turkish ones mean you’ll never guess how to pronounce that first name).
It turns out he’s a story in himself.
He used to be a left-wing activist and was arrested, along with several of his comrades, on a protest at the death of a well-known teacher and activist, Metin Lokumcu, on another demonstration.
Prosecutors decided to charge them with membership of a terrorist organisation but they couldn’t decide which one.
So they left them in jail for six months while they made their minds up, eventually admitting defeat and releasing them.
The compensation was quite generous, at least, Cagdas says.
He has a nice line in prison anecdotes, especially since several of the common law prisoners were members of the Grey Wolves, the far-right militia associated with the nationalist MHP.
“If you’re a hired killer what do you when the work runs out?” Cagdas asks.
One explained his racist ideology by assuring him that the Turks are the world’s top race because they can shoot a bow and arrow on horseback better than anybody else, although the skill seems to be widely practised in modern Turkey than it was on the central Asian planes several centuries ago.
On another occasion a group of Grey Wolves were expressing their certainty that homosexuality is a sin that will be punished severely in the afterlife.
“That’s true,” one said. “But, let’s face it, who here hasn’t had sex with a tranny at least once ?”
The others were obliged to concede the point.
Saturday 15 April, Ankara
A No banner hangs on the front of the CHP’s national headquarters in Ankara Photo: Tony Cross
The search for politicians ready to be interviewed on the referendum resumes.
It has proved especially difficult to find Yes campaigners to speak to us, the MHP being split on the question and AKP cadres apparently being reluctant for fear that they unthinkingly contradict the party line and bring their careers to an unplanned end.
But officials at the party’s Ankara headquarters are helpful when we turn up in their lobby and we end up speaking to the man in charge of the No campaign in the city, Nedim Yamali, in his spacious and well-furnished office.
Nedem Yamali Photo: Tony Cross
The claim that the constitutional reforms are a product of Erdogan’s megalomania is “a big lie”, he says, pointing out that they will allow for the president’s removal and prevent him standing again after 2029, although laying less emphasis on his proposed right to appoint the cabinet, issue decrees, declare a state of emergency and so on.
He also shares the Yes campaign’s distaste for coalition government, blaming previous ones for the country’s hard times before the AKP came to power and claiming that the reform would mean such a state of affairs would never be repeated.
We then meet a former AKP MP, Emin Dindar, in a more congenial setting, a charming café with art deco touches where he appears to hold court.
Dindar is a Kurd and a former mayor of Cizre-Sirak. Cagdas tells me his brother was killed by the PKK.
He takes an original line on the referendum, arguing that it will Erdogan a free hand to reopen the peace process and resume the improvement in Kurdish rights that the AKP started in the early years of its time in government.
He’s also not keen on coalitions.
As we leave, a man jumps up to greet Dindar, kissing his hand and engaging him in an intense conversation at a table on the sunny terrace.
CHP vice-president Telim Bingol Photo: Tony Cross
In another imposing party office, the opposition CHP’s national headquarters this time, party vice-president Telin Bingol says coalitions are getting an unjustly hard rap from the Yes campaign.
“Today we have unemployment, low-level economic crisis, lots of problems in our foreign policy and they have been ruling the country for 15 years by themselves,” he says. “There’s no coalition today and there’s no stability, either.”
On a precinct in central Ankara, sacked university lecturers Nuriye Gülman and Semih Özakca are staging a sit-in protest over their dismissal.
They have been here for about 100 days and have been on hunger strikes for 38.
To read my report for RFI Yes and No camps explain their cases click here
Sunday 16 April, Ankara
Market traders start work on referendum day in Ankara Photo: Tony Cross
Market traders are setting out their stalls as polling opens at Necla Kizilbag high school.
As the sun brings out the red in the rows of tomatoes, the green in a mountain of chillis, one of them explains the superiority of street markets to supermarkets – fresh, local produce, friendly service – to us.
This is a middle-class CHP-supporting area and the No voters are getting their disappointment in early, assuring us that fraud will deliver a Yes vote.
While the muhtar (mayor) Aydin Yasap, expects this area to vote No “because people are educated here”, journalist Nalan Aygun says she is pessimistic about the outcome because “we have a lot of uneducated people in Turkey” whom Erdogan knows how to manipulate.
This disdain for the “uneducated” is widespread among middle-class secularists and must surely impede the No campaign’s ability to win over the AKP’s working-class support base.
Opinion is more divided at another polling station, in Mamak district.
Here I am taken to task by Osman, a flashily dressed businessman playing with prayer beads, who takes my presence as an imperialist aggression.
“Do you think if I go to France and stand in front of a school, as you are doing, do you think I could do as you are doing freely?” he asks me.
He seems unconvinced by my assurance that he could, nor does my insistence that I am not personally responsible for the French or any other European government’s decisions cut much ice.
Like many AKP supporters, including Ankara party chief Yamali, Osman is enraged by the refusal of the Netherlands government and some German cities to allow Turkish ministers to address rallies on their soil.
The move worked for Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, so far as domestic politics were concerned, but it appears to have strengthened the resolve of many Turks to vote No and Erdogan has made the most of its potential.
Yasar Akalin and Zamazan Acar Photo: Tony Cross
At another polling station nearby, one AKP supporter refers to “crusaders” as muhtar Yasar Akalin predicts a 60-65% victory for Yes.
Having resorted to that venerable journalistic technique of talking to taxi drivers, we are surprised to find unanimous opposition to the reform.
Of course, it may be that some are telling us what they think we want to hear but the man who drives us back to my hotel has an interesting explanation, which may indicate that the AKP is losing its magic touch.
Taxi drivers and shopkeepers are feeling the pinch of a downturn in the economy, he explains, adding that he and his colleagues are also angry at hikes in petrol taxes and the government’s refusal to negotiate with their representatives.
The AKP “helps the poor”, Zamazan Acar told us at Mutlu polling station, citing free health care and other improvements in his life during the party’s time in power.
But some of the AKP’s support may evaporate if the economy continues its turn for the worse.
To read my report of polling in Ankara for RFI click here
CHP spokesperson Bülent Tezcan claims there has been fraud at the party’s headquarters Photo: Tony Cross
And now the result!
At the CHP HQ journalists and party members gather around a TV screen.
As results come in from the east, where the polls opened and closed earlier, the Yes has a substantial lead.
But it declines as the hours tick by.
It’s an agonising process, the activists are on edge, cheering good results even when they’re partial but far from confident in their campaign’s success.
The impression that the CHP thinks it has lost is reinforced when party apparatchiks sweep into the lobby and denounce alleged vote fraud.
Another CHP vice-president Erdal Aksünger claims that the party’s own returns show a No victory and accuses the state-run Anadolu news agency of issuing false results to demoralise their supporters.
The activists explode in chants of “Mustafa we are your soldiers” and other rousing Kemalist songs of a martial tone.
But the Yes lead is still falling as Izmir, Istanbul and Ankara seem to be going for No.
Izmir is a CHP bastion but losing in the other two would be a big blow to Erdogan, who started his national career as mayor of Istanbul.
In another dramatic announcement, party spokesperson Bülent Tezcan slams the high electoral authority decision during the day to allow unstamped ballot papers to be counted on the AKP’s request.
After an agonising wait the official result is revealed.
CHP activists chant as the result come through Photo: Tony Cross
Izmir, Istanbul and Ankara have indeed voted No but the country, according to the television, has voted Yes by a wafer-thin margin of 51.3 to 48.7.
As it comes through, Aksünger is making another announcement, claiming that 1.5 million unstamped ballots have been counted, denouncing the official results as fraudulent and vowing to fight them.
Neither the electoral authority or the courts, run by a purged magistrature, are likely to back the CHP’s appeal but it keeps the indignation-fuelled adrenalin pumping and the activists chant their defiance again.
To read my report of the result and the CHP’s reaction click here
Monday 17 April, Ankara
Bearing in mind that the two parties who campaigned for the Yes vote won 60% in the last general election and the odds stacked against the No campaign, the result is actually remarkable.
It shows a decline in Erdogan’s support, possibly the result of the economic turbulence that has hit the country.
But it still reveals a country “sliced in two like a water melon”, as Cumhuriyet columnist Cigdem Toker tells me.
The narrowness of the margin is unlikely to restrain Erdogan, who has already said he’s ready to have another referendum, this time on restoring the death penalty, giving the political finger to his European critics and finally slamming the door on the admittedly unlikely prospect of Turkey ever joining the EU.
But this bitterly divided country has plenty of other challenges.
To read What now for Turkey after Erdogan’s narrow referendum victory? click here
With Turkish nationalists split over the 16 April constitutional referendum and even some dissidence in President Recep Tayip Erdogan’s AKP, the country’s largest ethnic minority, the Kurds, found themselves courted by all. I visited Diyarbakir to see how the conflict in the south-east and the influence of the left-wing HDP were affecting the campaign.
The former caravanserai in Diyarbakir awaits a politiian’s visit during the referendum campaign Photo: Tony Cross
Tuesday 11 April 2107, Diyarbakir province
We’re on our way to see a little girl who is going to be called Yes for the rest of her life.
But more of that later.
As we drive across the flat countryside of the south-eastern province of Diyarbakir, a report comes through of an explosion at the main police station in Diyarbakir city, which we left about an hour ago.
Should we turn back? Has our search for the latest in nutty names meant we’ve missed a major news story?
At these times you weigh up sordid calculations like the numbers of dead and injured and the likely news impact of the event. We conclude that by the time we get back to the city the area will be well and truly sealed off and then an official statement that the blast, although big, was an accident in the police station’s garage, so we press on.
Mustafa Celik with Evet Photo: Tony Cross
We arrive in Gecitli, an alleged village that appears to consist of about three farms, and meet Mustafa Celik, a Kurdish farmer who is so enthusiastic about the referendum that he has decided to call his newborn daughter Evet, which even I know by now means Yes.
Celik has two wives and seven other kids, so maybe he was running out of ideas for names but one can’t help wondering whether he has weighed up the longterm consequences of his choice of name for his daughter.
Not that he isn’t an affectionate parent. He cradles Evet fondly in his arms as we stand in the sun outside his rectangular one-storey dwelling, chickens and ducklings pecking at the ground around us.
This stocky 43-year-old, who raises animals on several hectares of stony land, is one of the minority of Kurds who support President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP.
Adem Karakoc Photo: Tony Cross
He expresses the usual admiration for the leader but, above all, points out that no other bothered to provide his village with electricity and water or guarantee health care for the poor, important considerations when you live in a bare concrete block with no doors inside, even for the toilet, in the back of beyond.
It’s the reason Adem Karakoc and several of Celik’s relatives give for backing the AKP, when, at his request, we drop the proud father in their equally tiny village of Taveran.
I was anxious to speak to other people in the neighbourhood and suggested we go to see the local muhtar, a sort of mayor, but Celik told is he didn’t talk to the press, an assertion that doesn’t entirely convince me, since they apparently had a disagreement over the phone during a previous media visit.
HDP MP Feleknas Uca with hunger-striking prisoners’ families at her party’s headquarters in Diyarbakir Photo: Tony Cross
Diyarbakir is rife with rumours about that explosion, a favourite being that the police were preparing a bomb to plant at Saturday’s rally by the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) so as to revive the security concerns that won the AKP the second election in 2015.
We drive past the site and see the blast has done very substantial damage. On one side of the compound is another empty space – the site of a previous bombing, claimed by the Islamic State armed group.
The government has changed its mind and declared that yesterday’s explosion, which killed a police officer and two civilian personnel, was a terror attack.
A PKK unit dug a tunnel from the basement of a block of flats next door, they say, and they have issued photos to back up the claim. They show a wall daubed with “PKK” and other slogans, the tunnel itself and there’s even a bed for the industrious attacker to take a pause in.
Later the PKK claims responsibility, saying that it was a gesture against Erdogan’s “fascist” plan.
A security roundup has seen 177 people detained.
Pro-Kurd party under pressure on security
Behiye, on hunger strike for prisoners who include her son, Murat Photo: Tony Cross
“Just today dozens of our comrades involved in the campaign were arrested,” HDP MP Feleknas Uca tells us, after detailing the measures taken against her party since the 2016 failed coup.
She is sitting among a group of families of Kurds found guilty of membership of or association with the banned PKK – who are on hunger strike for improved conditions of detention.
One of them, Behiye, 56, tells us that her son, whom she first calls a “guerrilla” before correcting her terminology to “political prisoner”, is in the 21st year of a 26-year sentence and complains of overcrowded cells and other alleged mistreatment.
The HDP became a rallying point for a resurgent left after the protests against the closure of Istanbul’s Gezi Park, campaigning not only on Kurdish rights but also gender equality – all its posts are shared by a man and a woman despite the traditional conservatism of the south-east – LGBT rights and anti-capitalism.
But, having won 13.12 % of the vote in the June 2015 election, it saw its support decline to 10.75% in November.
In between the two polls the government had broken off the peace process with the PKK and launched a massive security operation to which the guerrillas responded in kind.
With his declarations that a No vote is a vote for the “terrorists”, Erdogan hasn’t held back from playing the security card again this year.
So one has to ask whether the HDP’s association with the PKK – pictures of its leader Abdullah Öcalan are hanging in the party headquarters where we meet Uca and she, like he hunger strikers, is wearing a garment bearing his portrait – has damaged the HDP among Turks who are not Kurds and conservative Kurds.
Uca is unrepentant.
“Today who is fighting Islamic State? It’s PKK. Today who are giving their lives for the people? It’s PKK,” she argues. “We can’t find a solution while we’re sending the PKK away from the table. We have to all get around the table to find a solution.”
Like Sinn Fein and other nationalists in Northern Ireland in the past, the HDP would be accused of treason if it distanced itself too far from armed struggle, whether its leaders wish to or not.
To read my interview with Feleknas Uca on RFI click here
Victimisation leads to solidarity
Mehtap Yörük serves a client Photo: Tony Cross
We meet Mehtap Yörük on the corner of a street in front of a café.
She is serving rice and chicken to customers, although she is a qualified teacher.
She is one of the thousands of state employees who were fired after the 2016 coup attempt.
She, like the others, has never been personally informed why, although the explanation for the purge is that those dismissed were members of the Fehtullah Gülen organisation that is believed to have plotted the putsch.
Which strikes Yörük as odd since, far from being a follower of the US-based imam, she is a left-wing social issues activist.
Of the 130,000 people purged since last July, at least 3,150 were trade unionists or other activists presumably fingered by employers or colleagues who wanted to see the back of them, according to left-wingers.
Serap Kilic behind the counter of her mezze shop Photo: Tony Cross
Serap Kilic and Selma Atabey are two more.
They have also gone into catering, opening a small mezze restaurant, where customers can eat cucumber in yoghurt, walnuts and dried tomatoes and other delicacies to background music that ranges from Kurdish music to Johnny Cash.
One striking thing about their story is that, while Atabey is a Kurd and a long-term Diyarbakir resident, Kilic is an ethnic Turk, sent to the south-east as a condition of her civil-service employment as a statistician.
The purge has at least revealed reserves of solidarity. Many of their customers are fellow victims and Kilic says that Kurdish people, who have plenty of experience of discrimination themselves, are sympathetic to her plight.
Despite some pressure from friends and family in Istanbul, she is happy to stay here, she says.
Atabey was a nurse and believes that her work with fellow trade unionists to provide medical care to people trapped under military-imposed curfews in Cizre and the central Diyarbakir district of Sur is the real reason for her dismissal.
A small girl is hanging around the restaurant as we speak.
She is the daughter of the cleaner, a mother of five whom the pair employed after finding her family had been forced out of their home in Sur, Kilic explains.
To read my report on Turkey’s purge victims and the referendum click here
Thursday 13 April, Diyarbakir
Nurcan Baysal in her office Photo: Tony Cross
Nurcan Baysal remembers the bullets that hit the block of flats she lives and works in during a military operation in Diyarbakir.
And she remembers visiting the site of the killing of the city’s bar association, Tahir Elci, and the bodies in the street where she was born, some of them with their eyes gouged out.
Baysal, a writer, newspaper columnist and activist, is certainly voting No, she tells us and she goes on to vent her rage against the Turkish state’s destruction of much of Sur.
“Can you imagine? For 5,000 years there has been life in this area and all this life has been demolished in the 21st century.”
A concrete barrier blocks access to part of Sur Photo: Tony Cross
Parts of Sur are still sealed off by concrete barriers installed by the military and armed police officers and vehicles are an ever-visible presence in the city centre.
In a No campaign base run by the HDP a young man called Isa wins applause when he says he’ll vote No because “I’m against all this fascist system and oppression”.
“Everybody is talking about economic problems but so many young people have lost their lives, mothers are crying and I don’t want mothers to cry,” he goes on.
Adil in his cheese shop Photo: Tony Crpss
But there are Kurds who will vote Yes.
One of them is Adil, the burly owner of a cheese shop in Sur.
He has no time for the PKK, accusing the guerrillas of bad faith during the peace process, and caring more about Yezidi refugees from Iraq than local people.
It’s difficult to stop Adil once he gets going, accusing both the army and the insurgents of being infiltrated by the Gülenists – as it happens many of the senior military arrested after the coup had been based in the south-east, although I know of no evidence of a Gülen-PKK overlap – and, for good measure, accusing the AKP of caring more about Syrians that the people of Sur.
Mehmet Kaya, the headmaster of a private school in a suburb of the city that is still under construction who works with local NGOs and is also an analyst, believes the PKK made a mistake in declaring autonomous zones in areas where the HDP had massive support.
It may have been a response to provocation by the state, he says, but the ensuing destruction drove enough Kurds away from the party to drastically reduce its vote in the November 2015 election and could still influence the referendum result.
Erdogan tries to win Kurds and nationalists
Erdogan, too, has to reconcile some contradictions.
He needs to win the support of conservative Kurds, who could even hold the balance of power in the referendum due to splits in the nationalist camp.
But his tone at a rally here at the beginning of the months was strongly nationalist, repeating the “One nation, one flag, one state” stance he has adopted since breaking off the peace process.
That’s because he must also rally the support of voters from the hard-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and that is far from guaranteed.
The party, which is strongly secular, is split over its leader’s support for the constitutional changes with several high-profile MPs campaigning against and a substantial number of voters opposed, according to opinion polls.
With its support for previous military dictatorships and its history of opposition to such basic demands as the right to speak the Kurdish language in public, the MHP is profoundly repellent to most Kurds.
Winning substantial Kurdish backing while keeping that of the nationalists is a tall order even for such a supreme political manoeuvrer as the Turkish president.
To read my report for RFI on the Kurds and the referendum click here
I arrived in Turkey just over a week before 16 April’s referendum whose aim was to put the popular stamp of approval on the de-facto concentration of power in the hands of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The odds were stacked against the opposition, to put it mildly. Here’s my account of the first leg of my reporting assignment.
No campaigners in Istanbul’s Isli district Photo: Tony Cross
Friday 7 April 2017, Istanbul
There’s no escaping the fact that Turkey is holding a referendum. Hundreds of banners are draped across the road from Atatürk airport and billboards address their message to the passing traffic.
It’s not immediately apparent that anyone opposes Erdogan’s proposed constitutional reform, however.
Apart from the huge portraits of Erdogan that have become a sort of Great Leader mood music in today’s Turkey, the vast majority of the posters, flags and whatnot tells you to vote “Evet” (Yes). It takes some time before you spot the jaunty sun with multi-coloured rays of the “Hayir” (No) campaign.
As we swing by an improvised structure on the banks of the Bosphorus, the taxi driver, with whom I have been discussing the day’s truck attack in Sweden with the help of a translation app on his phone, tells me that it is for a Yes rally to be addressed by Erdogan the following afternoon.
Shock! Horror! Clouds over Istanbul Photo: Tony Cross
Shockingly, by the time I reach my hotel the sky is overcast. I thought it was always sunny here!
Saturday 8 April, Istanbul
The ferry stop in Istanbul’s Karaköy district on a damp Saturday morning Photo: Tony Cross
Up early to talk to our morning broadcasts, I leave the hotel at about 9.00am in search of vox pops and campaigners.
The latter are a slack lot, clearly not judging it worth facing the public before midday.
And it starts to rain.
Finding English-speakers is not that easy – I’ve foolishly decided to do without a fixer/translator in cosmopolitan Istanbul –and, anyway, fewer people seem ready to speak to reporters than during my previous visits.
Eminömü market Photo: Tony Cross
But some are and the first of those are No voters.
Erman, an Armenian, has voted for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the past because, as with the Kurds, the party used to be more accommodating to his community than the secular nationalist parties.
“They built new churches, new schools but I don’t think this will happen again,” he explains. “Because with one leader everything will involve him and if he says anything everybody will think it is true. But I don’t think one man will change everything. This is not credible to me.”
Some other traders and customers in the bazaar at Eminönü are also in the No camp, one accusing Erdogan of wanting to be a dictator and a “new Sultan” but there are also Yes men, fans of Erdogan who say the extra powers the reform will give him will mean a “strong Turkey”.
Adulation of the president and a desire to see the country walk tall on the world stage are the two main refrains of Yes supporters, repeated as a crowd of thousands descend on the rally at 4.00pm.
“I love you Recep Tayyip Erdogan! I love you Binali Yildirim! Yes, government OK!” cries Ahmet in a not uncommon outburst of enthusiasm.
AKP supporters pose for selfies in front of a montage of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in martial mode Photo: Tony Cross
A little closer to the rally a crowd has gathered in front of a montage of an action film poster with the heads of Erdogan and other AKP leaders on the bodies of the battle-fatigued, gun-toting heroes.
This could be taken for satire but the loyalists posing for selfies in front of it seem to find it a congenial portrayal of their heroes.
Prime Minister Yildirim is warming up the crowd in a turkey-voting-for-Christmas contribution to a campaign whose success would mean the abolition of his job.
That’s a role his predecessor Ahmet Davutoglu declined to take on, putting him in the company of a small number of AKP dissidents that includes Abdullah Gül, a cofounder of the AKP along with Erdogan who alternated as president and prime minister with him between 2003 and 2014.
Deadlines and editing requirements mean I must leave before the president himself arrives in a helicopter to violate his current constitutional obligation of neutrality and speak forcefully in favour of a Yes vote.
The dispatches report that he called for a strong Turkey.
To read my report for RFI of Saturday’s rally and campaigning click here
Sunday 9 April, Istanbul
A Yes campaign boat Photo: Tony Cross
Sunday means another desperate search for people willing and able to speak to a radio reporter.
Several analysts I have interviewed previously don’t answer their mobiles, maybe because it’s the weekend or maybe because they fear joining the ranks of university professors purged since last year’s coup is unclear. The two who answer tell me they are not in Turkey at the moment.
I criss-cross the city on foot and by ferry, metrobus and taxi.
At the suggestion of colleagues I track down activists of the biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
With balloons, flags, leaflets and the sort of stirring music beloved of Turkish political campaigners, they seem a jolly lot.
But they are not happy with the way the campaign is playing out.
“AKP uses everything, especially money, and they don’t give any money to CHP,” said CHP veteran Kamer Demir. “So we cannot talk to our people, we cannot tell our things to people.”
CHP No campaigners at Kadiköy, Istanbul Photo: Toy Cross
One casualty of an ambient self-censorship is the 2012 film No that credited an advertising agency with the result of Chile’s 1988 plebiscite.
CHP leaders are reported to be trying to emulate the strategy outlined in the film and their logo is clearly lifted from it, which may explain why the Digiturk digital platform dropped No from its lineup in February.
Another, according to the Turkish Minute website, has been an anti-smoking campaign in the city of Konya.
Its slogan “If you say ‘no’, you have gained your future” appears to have displeased the city authorities and no longer appears on the city streets.
Media harassed
AKP members campaigning for a Yes vote in Karaköy Photo: Tony Cross
Hundreds of media outlets have been closed since then and dozens of journalists are in jail, described “hostages of this referendum” by Erol Onderoglu of Reporters Without Borders, who has served several months in prison himself.
The majority of media that remain open make no effort to hide their bias.
The satirical paper Penguen says that the Yes campaign has received 10 times more live airtime on television than the No campaign, while the Washington Hattisite has calculated that from 1-20 March the AKP had over 300 hours of national television coverage, “with the 169 hours clocked by President Erdogan alone almost three times that of the [secular] MHP and CHP combined”.
Thousands of people have been purged from their jobs in the public and private sectors since the coup attempt and thousands jailed.
Some of them were involved in the conspiratorial Fehtullah Gülen movement, which the government blames for the failed putsch but others, as I found when reporting from Turkey last summer, were trade unionists, left-wingers and other members of the awkward squad framed by employers or hostile colleagues.
Hundreds of its members are in jail, including its co-presidents, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yüksekdag along with 11 other MPs.
Demirtas’s absence from the campaign is a particular blow, with many commentators seeing him as the natural leader of the campaign, a far more attractive figure than the CHP’s bland and inconsistent Kemal Kiricdaroglu.
The atmosphere is rendered even more oppressive by the rhetoric employed by the president and his supporters, who warn that a No vote is a vote for “terrorists”, a term that is even more catchall in Turkey than elsewhere, applying in Erdogan-speak to coup plotters, PKK guerrillas, Islamic State and other armed groups, and anyone suspected of collusion with any of the above.
The bias in the media is also visible in the civil service, No campaigners tell me.
Government supporters can campaign for Yes during working hours, Emre a doctor and CHP member tells me, but No campaigners are certain to be fired if they do the same.
To read my report of the No campaign struggling to make its voice heard on RFI click here
Monday 10 April, Istanbul
Yasemin Bektas Photo: Tony Cross
Feminist Yasemin Bektas repeats some of those complaints when I meet her in a café in the hip district of Cihangir, where I am staying.
She has two hats, one as a member of an organisation encouraging women to vote in the referendum, the other encouraging them to vote No.
I would say the No hat is on today.
“We are not in equal conditions now,” she says. “It’s easy to say ‘Yes’, it’s so hard to say ‘No’.”
She point to the disparity in posters and other material from the opposition.
“It doesn’t mean we are not working. They are not giving us permission to work.”
She gives Erdogan credit for taking an interest in the women’s vote, despite cultural barriers to women’s involvement in politics.
“I remember in the first meeting he made about the AKP he asked the men ‘Take your wife with you’,” she says. “Some of them came, some of them stayed at home.
“In the second meeting he said “If you don’t take your wife, don’t come,’. He’s a clever man, He knows we’re half of the public.”
It was the first time women could enter the political arena but that didn’t mean the AKP intended to liberate them from traditional gender roles, according to Bektas.
Gender politics and violence against women
“For the first issue is mothering. We are mothers and we have to bear children, we have to care for children. But there’s also gender equality. I don’t have to have a child. Maybe I don’t want to be a mother, maybe I want. Maybe my love is not to a man, I love women, maybe I don’t love anyone.
“We are killed, we are raped. In the past 15 years every day five women [have been] killed in Turkey. There has been significant increases in child abuse, female murders, violence rates.”
The conservative discourse, pushing women into the home and blaming them for rape and other assaults because of their clothing, for example, has empowered men inclined to violence, she argues.
I ask if I can take a picture of her and she leaps up to arrange her hair in a mirror.
2016 having turned out to be the year of the unpredictable, there’s been a brief spasm of soulsearching in the news media. Maybe one question we might like to address is the often unconscious bias in the words we use.
TV crews film Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip in 2009. Photo: Tony Cross
Are journalists really an out-of-touch metropolitan elite?
Well, to some extent, yes. Even if most journalists are not the well-paid celebrities that Brexiteers or Trump voters love to hate, we are educated, middle-class people who share the outlook of a certain social grouping and we can mistake that outlook for “objectivity”.
We’ve all heard those reports where the journalist, often in response to a question that invites them to be the spokesperson for a whole population, tells us “People think …”
Who are those people? Usually they’re the people we work with, the people we had dinner with last night, perhaps the politicians and pundits we’ve been interviewing, a very specific milieu whose opinions and prejudices are generally similar to those of the reporter.
For the reporter all reasonable people think this way – even if the equivalent milieu thought very differently on the same questions 50 or 100 years ago – and this outlook tends to be mistaken for the natural order of things.
This internalised bias is reflected in our coverage of events, our choice of subject matter and the terminology used in media that pride themselves on their objectivity.
Here are some terms I feel are widely abused:
Moderate/extremist: Do you consider any of your own opinions extreme? No, and nobody else thinks theirs are, either. Dubbing someone “extreme”, and even more so an “extremist”, puts them beyond the pale, situating them in relation to a consensus that you have not bothered to define and in general reflects your own prejudices. Was the Iraq War moderate in its aims, conduct or achievement? Did it enjoy majority support, either in the countries who waged it or in the Middle East? But how often have you seen Tony Blair or George Bush described as extreme? The consensus in the average newsroom has been confounded on several occasions in 2016. I’m not going to argue that Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson or George Osborne are leading us to a brighter dawn. But are they extreme? Or are just the first three extreme and BJ and George moderates fallen into bad company? A more specific description of a political, religious or philosophical stance is more accurate and less value-loaded. Of course, we need a short-hand description of movements to the left or the right of the mainstream – far left, hard left, far right and hard right don’t carry so much implicit judgement.
Centre-right: Here, as I remember it, is how this term slipped into the political lexicon. Once upon a time the British Conservatives, Republicans, Gaullists etc were just plain right-wing and nobody thought any more about it. In the 1980s, led by Thatcher and Reagan, the mainstream right moved right. The mainstream left moved right as well, leading commentators to describe the Clintons, Blairs etc more or less accurately as centre-left. Then people without much political culture started saying “If there’s a centre-left there must be a centre-right” and relabelling the mainstream right parties “centre-right”. “Centre” had become one of those approval words, like “moderate”. But those parties hadn’t moved to the centre at all. There’s nothing particularly centre about today’s Republicans or Tories. François Fillon, the mainstream right’s candidate in next year’s presidential election in France, wants to scrap 500,000 public-sector jobs and thinks French colonialism was a sort of prototype for the Alliance française. What’s centrist about that?
International community: What is this entity? Who’s in and who’s out? Do you qualify by GDP, colonial history, skill in English? Is it established by UN votes? Or is it a way to make the opinions and interests of the world’s richest and most powerful countries sound like just plan common sense?
Reporters at Paris’s Bataclan concert hall, the scene of one the November 2015 Paris attacks Photo: Tony Cross
Terrorist: OK, this is an old chestnut. Terrorism is a bit like populism, we know it exists but we can’t really define it. Some people use it to describe non-state political violence but the origin of the term lies in its use by the French state after the revolution and virtually every politician has at some time or another labelled some government or other “terrorist”. We tend not to us the word to describe anyone whose actions we condone. Not many people nowadays use it for World War II resistance movements, although the German army certainly did. And we all know about “freedom fighters”, although we may not agree as to whether they operated in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba or, in any case, in what historical period they did so. I see that the BBC styleguide advises “its use can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding”, preferring “words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as bomber,attacker,gunman,kidnapper,insurgentandmilitant”, advice that is more honoured in the breach than in the observance, as far as I can see.
Militant: Which brings me to “militant”. I blame the south Asians for this. In the 70s and 80s, as I remember it, we had “trade union militants”, who may not have had a very good press but were rarely accused of shooting managers or bombing factories. Then there were quite a few armed groups active in south Asia and the media there tended to refer to them as “militants”. That seeped into BBC and other British coverage, later spreading to other English-language media. It’s true, so far as I can make out, that the roots of “militant” are the same as those of “military” but the former term has meant “combative” in a non-military sense for some time. The church militant is not exclusively that involved in the crusades, the militancy of the British miners was not armed resistance. And what is an “anti-abortion militant”? A “pro-life” activist or a marksman who shoots doctors at family planning clinics? In France we have the added complication that the French word militant just means activist, leading to all sorts of confusion in translation (I’m looking at you, AFP!). Ambiguous and best avoided, in my opinion.
