As the crisis increasingly dominates its national economy, the Turkish State has been increasing the level of repression in the country. The latest victims of this repression were Şebnem Korur Fincancı, the head of the Turkish Medical Association, and Cihan Kolivar, the head of the Bread Producers’ Union.

Fincancı was arrested in late October following a statement she made on a television program on the claims that the Turkish Armed Forces used chemical weapons on PKK guerrillas. Fincancı said that the claims were worth investigating, and moreover, they seemed true based on the footage of the deceased guerrillas. President Erdoğan himself personally targeted Fincancı, saying she should pay for her words and also be replaced as the head of the Turkish Medical Association. The prosecutors and the police did not waste much time in charging Fincancı with terrorist propaganda and arresting her afterward. She is currently awaiting trial.

Kolivar was arrested in early November, again following a statement he made on a television program. Stating that bread was not a healthy food, Kolivar said societies fed by bread, such as the people of Turkey, are foolish and thus elect leaders like the Turkish government. Kolivar was charged with insulting the Turkish people, its president, and bread itself, and put in prison. Kolivar was released soon after, above all because he’d merely offended the current Turkish government rather than expose the Turkish national State like Fincancı, however his trial will continue.

Although the Turkish Medical Association, along with the Union of Turkish Engineers’ and Architects’ Chambers, has long stood with DİSK (Confederation of Progressive Workers Unions) and KESK (Confederation of Public Employees’ Unions) and taken part in strikes in the medical sector, it is a professional organization rather than an actual union. As such, it includes proletarians as well as doctors who own their own practices. As for the Bread Producers’ Union, it too is not an actual workers’ union but an organization of small bakery owners. While the statements of Fincancı and Kolivar were certainly sensational, the fact that it is the leaders of such middle class organizations, rather than the leaders of actual workers’ organizations such as DİSK, KESK and even the more militant small unions around Umut-Sen (Union of Hope) and İşçi Hareketi Koordinasyonu (Coordination of the Workers’ Movement), demonstrates that the Turkish government is still hesitant of targeting the leaders of workers’ unions directly, afraid of provoking workers’ reaction.

Fincancı, like the rest of the leadership of DİSK and KESK, is an opportunist, affiliated with a political party allied with Kurdish nationalists.

Especially Fincancı’s arrest was protested in numerous Turkish and Kurdish cities by the local Labor and Democracy Forces, which are political front groups made up of leftist unions, professional associations and political parties. Without a doubt, the proletariat should be opposed to such political repression. However, the way forward is not a front of unions and opportunist parties from above, but an actually class-based front of workers’ organizations, and workers’ organizations only, from below, employing methods of class struggle rather than democratic protest against bourgeois repression.