May Day—The Wall Reveals All

"Turkey welcomes you". That's how the slogan for the country's tourism campaign goes. Whether with open arms, or nightsticks and tear gas might vary depending on what part of the year the visit takes place. And May 1st surely falls in to the latter category.

On my way back from some long time spent abroad, my native Turkey had given me "its warmest welcome" on that very day. While it seemed like another Labor Day pitched battle for us natives, it may have not been so for the unfortunate tourists who were exposed to the fury of the police. "Isn't the cold war over?" they might have been asking. Not on this land, folks.

In here, the cold war goes on everyday, between any two parties: Secular-Islamist, Sunni-Alevi, Turk-Kurd, Istanbulite-Anatolian, Fenerbahce-Galatasaray, rapper-punk, so on and so forth. There's an ongoing tension — on the bus, in the streets — that's waiting to get physical any moment. But only very few of these positions can face hostility from any layer of the society. And among those positions, the most suppressed and marginalized of all, is the left and its values (special thanks go to the 1980 coup).

It was during that same 80s oppressive atmosphere when words like devrim (revolution), örgüt (organization) and eylem (action) have been forced out from Turkish people's everyday vocabulary. They went on to live in the children's names, today serving as a litmus test for whose parents were revolutionaries back in the day. Today, the resistance those words still have to endure is by itself a substantial proof of the ongoing "cold war".

This May 2nd 2008 photo taken on Istiklal Caddesi — one of the "battlefields" of May 1st — leads one to similar analyses. The wall is of a famous electronics' store, and written on it, is the word devrim (revolution), possibly a souvenir from the previous day's incidents. As seen in the photo, the store's answer to this "marginalized" word is a sticker that strikes back with three weapons: Football — opium of the masses, the national flag, and the corporate logo. What a trio.