On Sunday, June 14, in Edirne, in northwest Türkiye near the border with Bulgaria, company thugs opened fire on workers and their families at Özşen Mining who were fighting for unpaid wages and against layoffs. This vicious attack was protested on Monday, June 15, in various provinces across Türkiye. At the protest held in Izmir, the country’s third-largest city, Can Denizli, a member of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International) and a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, delivered the following speech.

Dear friends and members of the press,

On behalf of the Socialist Equality Party-Fourth International, I greet you and the Özşen Mining workers who are waging a courageous struggle in Edirne.

Yesterday, the Özşen Mining workers—who have been fighting for 26 days over unpaid wages and against layoffs—came under armed attack by the company’s thugs, before the very eyes of the security forces. Shots were fired from two separate weapons into an area where children, women and workers were present. By sheer luck, there was no loss of life, and no one was injured.

We send our greetings to the miners, their families and the leaders of Bağımsız Maden-İş, who have declared that they will not bow to this violent attack, and we declare our solidarity with them.

This attack is directed not only at the Özşen Mining workers, but at the entire working class; it is an attack on all of us.

One day earlier, construction workers and members of Dev Yapı-İş union employed at the building site of the new Palace of Justice in Ankara were attacked with knives and clubs by the thugs of the subcontracting company because they had demanded their unpaid wages. And on the same day as the armed attack on the miners, police in Ankara violently detained 41 teachers who were demanding wages and appointments.

These are not isolated incidents. Amid the imperialist aggression escalating around Türkiye, the capitalist ruling class can no longer suppress mounting social inequality and the struggles of the working class by the old methods. This is precisely why the destruction of democratic rights targets the working class above all.

The Türk-İş, Hak-İş and DİSK confederations are silent, as always. These bureaucratic apparatuses, which have strangled workers’ struggles for decades, will not defend the workers today either—and they are not defending them. Yet today, the focus of every mine, every factory, every workplace, and every university must be the armed attack being waged against the miners and through them, against the entire working class.

There can be no doubt that workers across the country, whether unionized or not, feel enormous anger at this attack and want to respond. To do so, the trade union bureaucracy must be overcome. These bureaucrats, like the political establishment with which they join hands, defend the capitalist profit system and the rule of capital that make such vile attacks inevitable, in Türkiye and across the world.

An organized, mass working-class resistance to the capitalist class’s mounting social and physical assault worldwide can be developed only by building independent committees from below.

This struggle is international by its very nature. That is why we, as the Socialist Equality Party, call on all workers to unite in the ranks of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), established as a global organising centre. As this attack makes clear, building the IWA-RFC is also indispensable if workers are to defend themselves collectively.

Our demands are clear:

• Pay the miners all their unpaid wages immediately!
• Reinstate those who were dismissed!
• Prosecute and jail the perpetrators of the attack and those who instigated it!

From miners to teachers, from construction workers to textile workers, we must unite all sectors of the international working class that are joining the struggle under a common programme of class struggle.

Build a revolutionary workers’ movement that will fight against capitalist exploitation, imperialist war and growing repression, and for socialism!

Thank you.