Since the 1980s, socialist band Grup Yorum has been at the forefront of revolutionary battles in Turkey. Facing censorship, concert bans, imprisonment and right-wing attacks under successive governments, repression of the group’s music and political message has intensified under the ruling AKP party under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The April and May 2020 deaths on hunger strike of leading musicians Helin Bölek and İbrahim Gökçek have highlighted that Grup Yorum’s struggle is now a matter of survival against the forces of fascist barbarism.
Grup Yorum emerged as part of the student protest movement at Marmara University in 1985, as the supposed restoration of democracy in the years after the 1980 military coup wore thin. By 1986, 650,000 people had been arrested, with executions and torture rife, under a regime which aimed to crush communists, trade unionists and other opposition forces. Releasing the first of over 20 albums in 1987, Grup Yorum captured the spirit of the times in poetic lyrics depicting state repression and violence, but also full of revolutionary optimism.
Inspired by Victor Jara and other nueva cancion songwriters in Latin America, the group’s music was internationalist and anti-racist, embracing Kurdish culture at a time when the Turkish ruling class had outlawed it. Grup Yorum is hailed as the first Turkish band to record in the Kurdish language. Other songs attacked the Zionist invasion of Palestinian camps in Lebanon, called for the release of political prisoners and drew on Arabic laments depicting Ottoman military abuses.
Openly calling for a new anti-imperialist movement, the band has faced constant repression, with over 400 arrests and repeated fines and cancellations. As a truck carried the 1993 album Cesaret (‘Courage’) to the Kurdish-majority town of Diyarbakir, Turkish soldiers halted the shipment and blasted the cassettes with bullets.
Despite the repression, Grup Yorum remains one of the bestselling bands in Turkish history. A 25th anniversary concert on 12 June 2010 in the Beşiktaş football stadium was attended by 55,000 fans; the band organised a new annual series of free gigs, attracting 150,000 and 250,000 attendees in 2011 and 2012. Concert-goers joined en masse in singing the choruses of anti-fascist, socialist and revolutionary anthems. Seeing such mobilisations as an existential threat, Erdoğan and the ruling class renewed their attempts to crush Grup Yorum. In January 2013, five band members were arrested and later released on unproved charges of being members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C). In October 2016, police destroyed the group’s instruments in an attack on the Idil Cultural Centre. Months-long arrests took place after concerts and by February 2018, six band members were placed on a wanted list by the AKP regime, each with a TL300,000 (£35,000) bounty.
Most of the wanted band members were caught and imprisoned. In May 2019 several members went on hunger strike, demanding the release of the prisoners and the lifting of the ban on Grup Yorum concerts. Ibrahim Gökçek and Helin Bölek continued their fasts after their release and died after 323 and 228 days respectively on hunger strike. Both their funerals were attacked by Turkish police and Grey Wolves fascists.
European imperialism has blood on its hands. In November 2019, German police raided and banned a Grup Yorum solidarity concert in Cologne. The British government, like the EU and US, continues to label the DHKP-C, PKK and other progressive Turkish and Kurdish organisations as terrorist groups. The AKP government’s mass repression and imprisonment of all opponents, its racist treatment of minorities and its neo-Ottoman invasions of Syria and Libya have not prevented the British ruling class from maintaining arms links with the Erdoğan junta, and the British government wants to strengthen economic ties after Brexit.
At the time of writing, four band members, Ali Araci, Emel Yesilirmak, Bergun Varan and Sultan Gökçek, remain in prison. Grup Yorum has applied for permits for a public concert on 9 August, receiving immediate rejection from the authorities. Grup Yorum’s struggle continues.
Support the Free Grup Yorum campaign at https://freegrupyorum.wordpress.com/2020/11/26/write-a-letter/
Alaois Abu Layth
