Erdogan, Pilsudski & Khomeini
—Riley’s presentation to the IBT conference, 11 April 2017 (with introduction as circulated in the IBT, 13 May 2017)
Reprinted below are my remarks to the conference on the issue of the coups against Morsi and Erdogan. Apart from a few minor copy-edits the only change is that I corrected references to the jailing of HDP [pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party] parliamentarians by inserting “some of” in square brackets. During the discussion cde. Barbara pointed out that not all of the HDP deputies had been arrested.
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I have found this discussion to be disturbing. Comrade Mikl revealed that he has some problems with the iSt’s position towards Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution and tends to think the correct position was to support the Islamist reactionaries against the imperialist-backed Pahlavi dictatorship. This of course would represent a major line shift. In Trotskyist Bulletin No. 3, “In Defense of the Trotskyist Program,” for example, we reprint a 1988 statement defending the SL’s formula of “Down with the Shah! No Support to the Mullahs!” against the left-centrists of Workers Power (which I have appended). So this is something which must be carefully discussed.
As I noted in my presentation however, Mikl’s position on Erdogan is at least logically consistent with his position on Khomeini. The same cannot be said for others with whom we disagree on this issue. Comrade Heiko argued in favor of defending Erdogan against the Gulenist-Kemalists on the basis that his Kurdish leftist friends who hate the AKP nonetheless considered his regime to be a lesser evil than the Turkish military. My impression is that Heiko values their judgement and knowing their political orientation, presumes that if they defend the noxious regime it must be because they know things about the situation that are not readily apparent from the outside.
The comrades who consider that Russia is imperialist were uniformly of the view that we should defend Erdogan’s regime against the coup. In the course of the discussion they preferred to sidestep the question of a parallel with Iran. In my remarks to the conference I complained that the comrades who earlier rejected the comparison on the grounds that Khomeini’s regime in 1979 was an Islamist dictatorship, while Erdogan’s in 2016 was an attenuated bourgeois democracy, ignored the carefully researched document I submitted early in the pre-conference discussion period which proved that there had been considerably more democratic space in the early days of the Iranian Islamic Republic than in contemporary Turkey. Comrade Barbara, after prompting, responded that the reason there had been no response to the document was because she and her co-thinkers agreed with “most” of it. Except, obviously, the essentials. The “imp” comrades adamantly insist that they remain firmly committed to the iSt position on the Iranian Revolution.
We have pointed out that in both cases a more or less secular military apparatus was opposed by a reactionary Islamist mass movement. We reminded the comrades that in its writings on Iran the revolutionary iSt explicitly equated Khomeini’s movement with those headed by Erdogan in Turkey and Morsi in Egypt. The comrades made no response. Nor did they have much to say about the close similarity between the July 1980 attempted military coup against Khomeini, and the events in Turkey 36 years later. In both cases a section of the military attempted to depose Islamist regimes which claimed electoral mandates. The Khomeinites, unlike Erdogan’s AKP, won a parliamentary majority in an election which all parties, including leftist ones, agreed had accurately reflected the views of the electorate. The Iranian coupsters attacked the parliament buildings, just as their Turkish counterparts did in 2016. In both cases the coup attempts failed because the majority of officer corps withheld support.
After several challenges to explain why we should not apply the iSt policy in Turkey, Barbara, in her final summary, could do no better than vaguely assert that they were not comparable because the Khomeinites (presumably unlike Erdogan) were engaged in a “continuous process” of imposing theocratic rule. Had there been an opportunity to respond I would have begun by observing that the “continuous process” of Islamist erosion of nominal democratic forms was a similarity, not a difference, in the two situations.
For me the lowest point in the discussion came when comrade Bill preposterously claimed, without, as I recall, offering any evidence or even explanation, that the two situations were absolutely dissimilar and in no way analogous. This seemed so obviously false that I could only conclude that it was motivated by frustration at being unable to come up with a rational explanation for why our attitude toward Erdogan’s Islamist project in Turkey should not be modelled on the iSt response to the rise of Khomeini’s theocratic regime in Iran. The subsequent vote determined our public line, but it has not changed the political reality.
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Erdogan, Pilsudski & Khomeini – 11 April 2017
This is a very important discussion with a lot of potential implications. But it has also been a very confused one. In part I think this is because at times we have all tended to look at the July 2016 coup simply in terms of “bourgeois democracy” vs. military dictatorship. In fact, the real issue is what attitude to take toward the Islamist political project of Erdogan and the AKP.
What has partially obscured this is that the AKP’s attitude to bourgeois democracy has shifted dramatically, if incrementally, during its 15 years in power. Initially electoral participation allowed the AKP to administer the Turkish state. Since 2002 it has gradually shifted the rules of the game—and the personnel of key state institutions—in a way that promotes its Islamist agenda. Years ago, Erdogan indiscreetly observed that he viewed democracy as a train from which you alight when you get to your destination. The AKP got to its destination several years ago and alighted.
The issue in Turkey (and Egypt with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime) is essentially the same one posed in 1979 in Iran. As cdes know I went back, reviewed this history and wrote up an account of those events. I hoped it might help us come to an understanding of these more recent events. So far there has not been much of a response. Perhaps comrades are just not sure what to think about it.
The Spartacists paid little attention to the tremendous sense of liberation the Iranian masses experienced at the shah’s overthrow, but it was really quite remarkable. The USec and the other leftists who hailed the dynamic of the “Iranian Revolution,” expecting that it would soon transcend its clerical leadership, found plenty to celebrate. The mullahs promised to abolish censorship, to smash the shah’s police state, to free the thousands of political prisoners and to institute wide ranging democratic reforms. They made good on a lot of that—at least initially.
There was a huge expansion in democratic space. Thousands of trade unionists and leftists were freed from jail, unions were organized, leftist groups held big public meetings and freely distributed their publications. Militant printers commandeered their employers’ presses and started bringing out editions of Marx and Lenin. This massive wave of class struggle involving millions of workers resulted in major gains in wages and working conditions. One amazing moment in this enormous upsurge of popular democracy was a debate on national television over whether or not Iran’s economy should be nationalized between Iran’s leading Hansenite and a prominent Khomeinite economist (and future president).
The Iranian Revolution had huge geopolitical implications. Most of the international left hailed the shah’s overthrow as a powerful “anti-imperialist” blow against U.S. dominance of the Middle East. It was certainly true that the loss of the shah’s regime represented a major setback for American imperialism.
If our criterion was the creation of democratic space, or striking blows against U.S. global control, a plausible case could be made for siding with Khomeini against the shah. This is certainly how most of the left viewed it, which is why the Cliffites, the Mandelites, the Healyites, the Avakianites, the Breznevites, the Hansenites and all the others, were saying roughly the same things. Only the Trotskyist Spartacist tendency chose not to point their guns in the same direction as the mullahs.
On the eve of the decisive showdown, the January 5th 1979 Workers Vanguard bluntly posed the issue as a choice between “the shah’s pro-Western form of military dictatorship” and “the establishment of a Muslim theocratic state….” This is essentially the same choice posed in Turkey last July. Of course, no two historical situations are identical. One major difference is that in Turkey the forces of Islamic reaction were not promising to release political prisoners or expand democratic rights—just the opposite. But what the two situations have in common is the question of whether we should have a preference for “a Muslim theocratic state,” over a “military dictatorship.”
The defeat of the coup, as Erdogan publicly remarked, presented a huge opportunity for the AKP to remove any remaining obstacles to its project. Whatever your opinion about how much democratic space existed in Turkey prior to the coup, or how much survives today, we surely all agree that there is a great deal less freedom for Turkish workers today than there was under Khomeini in the early days. I think this should trouble comrades whose impulse is to defend Erdogan against the coupsters.
There is a logic to politics; which is why comrades who want to bloc with Erdogan in 2015 sound a lot like the Hansenites circa 1980 explaining why they sided with Khomeini during the Iran-Iraq war. Their argument was simply that there was more democracy under the mullahs than Saddam Hussein:
“Iraq is governed by a brutal military dictatorship that has eliminated all open political opposition, that has prevented the growth of independent workers organizations, opposition newspapers, or opposition parties.”
The Hansenites were not entirely uncritical of Khomeini’s regime—they acknowledged that democratic rights had been significantly encroached upon, but they preferred to emphasize the positive:
“However much the Iranian capitalists would like to follow that [Iraqi regime’s] example, and whatever repressive steps the Iranian government has taken, the fact remains that it has been unable to achieve the same results.”
They pointed out that, unlike in Iraq:
“Political parties, including workers parties, function openly in Iran despite attempts to intimidate or repress them. Groups like the Tudeh (Communist) Party and the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE) put out legal newspapers and maintain public headquarters….”
I think that the impulse to want to side with Erdogan against the coup is at least partly because it follows a familiar formula—i.e., normally Marxists defend elected governments against military attempts to overthrow them. But this formula, like all others, is not universally valid, and we can get into trouble if we apply it too mechanically. The simple fact is that over the past dozen years under Turkey’s AKP (as under the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood) democracy was pretty severely reduced and the regime is clearly committed to eliminating what little remains, as is clear from the fact that immediately after the coup’s defeat Erdogan banned 19 trade unions.
One of the most powerful arguments used by the iSt against the OROs supporting Khomeini was the regime’s overt misogyny. Workers Vanguard (Jan 19th, 1979) wrote that “the religious opposition’s attitude toward women—a key social question in backward, especially Islamic, societies—is more reactionary than the shah’s superficially modernizing regime.” This is also true of the AKP, as we have documented. Under Erdogan’s rule the rate of “gender-related homicide” tripled, while domestic violence soared 1,400%. The identity between Khomeini, Morsi and Erdogan on this question is no surprise—misogyny is a core feature of Islamist reaction in all its various denominations.
The revolutionary iSt explicitly equated Khomeini’s movement with Morsi’s Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt and Erdogan’s Turkish equivalent:
“The core of his [Khomeini’s] movement, however, is identical to that of other Islamic fundamentalist groupings in the Near and Middle East such as… the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab-speaking world or the National Salvation Party of Turkey.”
—WV, 5 January1979
As an organization committed to upholding the revolutionary heritage of the SL, this should be our default position. But those comrades who want to defend Erdogan’s AKP must effectively reject it. Which is why their arguments end up echoing Joe Hansen and Ernest Mandel’s pronouncements about democratic space under Khomeini.
Comrade Mikl’s position, as I understand it, has no such inconsistency. He thinks that the iSt was wrong in 1979. He thinks that revolutionaries should have sided with Khomeini against the shah and his U.S. backers. While I completely reject this conclusion, he is at least being “consequent” (as the German comrades put it). And he is also quite right to see the key issue posed in Iran in 1979 as essentially the same as in Turkey in 2016.
The comrades who want to defend Erdogan have offered various explanations. The document put out by Barbara and Adaire stresses that Erdogan still adheres to some democratic formalities. It is quite true that Erdogan had not eliminated all dissent—although [some of] his HDP-Kurdish parliamentary critics are presently sitting in jail and their Kemalist colleagues have been threatened with similar treatment if they continue to object. But he did at least he let them get elected. Of course, as we have pointed out, Pilsudski did exactly the same.
Barbara and Adaire consider that this month’s referendum “in which he needs a yes vote to consolidate his power” shows that Erdogan was not “fully a Bonaparte in July, or even now.” Could we perhaps agree that he is a 95% Bonaparte? Since the coup, he has been ruling by decree, having imposed a “state of emergency,” and he clearly intends to continue doing so indefinitely. Of course, if he wins the referendum, the new presidential system will give him the same rights. Speaking in his hometown prior to the coup, Erdogan boasted that he had already established a de-facto presidential system—and that winning the referendum would only update the constitution by bringing it into correspondence with reality.
So I think the comrades have a very weak case. The simple fact is that in Turkey there has been very little democracy at least since the Gezi protests were crushed in 2013.
One argument that has been floated to distinguish Khomeini’s rule from Erdogan’s, is that the Iranian Islamists came to power by overthrowing a dictatorship, whereas in Turkey they took a parliamentary route. The substance of the question—should we bloc with Islamic theocrats—is the same in either case. But, as it happens, both scenarios occurred in Iran. In July 1980 the shah’s supporters (with American backing) launched a military coup against Khomeini. By this point a referendum had voted 97% in favor of an Islamic republic and Khomeini’s party had won the most deputies in the parliamentary elections. So the attempted coup in Iran in 1980, like the one in Turkey last year, was aimed at deposing an elected parliament. The Hansenites, predictably enough, defended the mullahs’ regime against the coup on the grounds that it was somewhat more democratic, the same argument used by comrades to defend the Turkish Islamists.
The fact that Erdogan abides by some constitutional technicalities, while gutting any real democratic content, is one reason we consider his regime to be essentially the same as Pilsudski’s. It is worth noting that initially, Hitler, in order to consolidate power, carefully abided by all constitutional requirements. Hitler’s first act after being appointed chancellor by Hindenburg on January 30th 1933, was to call a new election for March 5th. All proper, all by the book. Every party stood candidates–including the KPD, which elected 80 deputies. But the KPD members, like [some of] the Kurdish HDP parliamentarians today, were unable to take their seats because they were all either thrown in jail or hiding out from the police. In both cases they were charged with supporting “terrorism.”
Another parallel was that, like the AKP, the Nazis on their own lacked the votes to make up the supermajority required to change the constitution and legalize a dictatorship. Erdogan’s AKP won a majority in the November 2015 election, but still needed to strike a deal with the MHP to get enough support to amend the constitution to create a presidential system. Hitler had to make various concessions to the Catholic Center party in a lengthy negotiation that was finally concluded on March 22nd 1933. The next day, with the passage of the enabling act, we could say that bourgeois democracy in Germany was fully “attenuated,” although the Nazis still met their legal obligation to obtain Reichstag approval to renew the enabling act when it expired. They actually did so twice.
The point is that it can take time before new, upstart regimes feel fully secure. Khomeini proceeded very carefully for the first year and a half. Pilsudski needed a decade to finally turn Poland’s parliamentary system into a presidential one. Erdogan has taken even longer. But Marxists should be less interested in Erdogan’s observation of constitutional technicalities than in the extralegal methods he has employed to get the results he wants. Erdogan’s “Ottoman Hearths” play the same role in Turkey as Hitler’s stormtroopers did in Germany, and Khomeini’s Hezbollah in Iran. The Ottoman Hearths are a pretty nasty outfit. They are organized, they are armed and there are two million of them.
They played a big role in “correcting” the unsatisfactory result of the June 2015 election by pogroms directed at the Kurdish population, and attacks on leftist meetings and neighborhoods with large secular or minority populations. The November election was called on August 25th and a few weeks later, on the night of September 8th, Erdogan’s thugs launched simultaneous attacks on 128 HDP offices across the country—torching some and smashing up others. If the police turned up, they just stood around and did nothing. For the next couple of months, opposition organizers and even some candidates and reporters, were assaulted at home or on the street. The AKP denied any responsibility, but the tactic worked. Between June and November the HDP vote dropped by about a million and Erdogan got his majority. Should revolutionaries want to defend a regime that wins elections in this fashion on the grounds of “democracy”?
Joseph Hansen was an experienced and skillful polemicist who specialized on putting an orthodox-sounding spin on whatever opportunist maneuver the SWP was currently engaged in. The SWP gave their defense of Khomeini against the July 1980 coup some Trotskyist cover by conflating it with direct imperialist military intervention. (“Iran: the Contradictions of a Bourgeois Nationalist Leadership,” ICP, 25 August 1980, p865) The Spartacist League, by contrast, made a clear distinction between the two. In the case of an imperialist military intervention the iSt made it clear that revolutionaries would side with the mullahs; in a falling out between Pahlavi loyalists and Islamic reaction they correctly asserted that workers had no side. This distinction makes just as much sense today as it did in 1980.
The revolutionary SL considered the Khomeinites, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the AKP’s Islamist precursor, to be the enemies of the working class who were every bit as dangerous as the reactionary military regimes they opposed. WV wrote:
“It is downright criminal that none of the leftist groups will tell their own members or supporters the truth that is looming up ominously in front of their noses, namely that this movement is reactionary and a threat to anyone labeled a leftist or a communist.”
—WV, 2 February 1979
What has been going on in Turkey for the past dozen years is a sort of slow motion version of what occurred in Iran in a much more compressed timeframe. The AKP, representing the traditional Islamist wing of the Turkish ruling class, managed to gradually and incrementally erode the institutional groundwork established by the more secular, Western-oriented Kemalists who had enjoyed the upper hand for 90 years after deposing the sultan. The AKP, from the outset, wanted to get rid of Ataturk’s secular legal system and replace it with Sharia law. But they proceeded very carefully for a decade.
The tipping point came in 2013 when the regime crushed the Gezi protest—correctly identifying the participants as secular, modernizing types who favor wicked things like abortion rights, free speech, liquor, women’s liberation and gay equality. Erdogan and his supporters oppose all that in the name of modesty, piety, chastity—in other words domestic slavery, censorship, and theocracy.
The Gezi protest started small. A few hundred Turkish hipsters, ecology buffs and metrosexuals who objected to Erdogan’s plan to turn over a chunk of a one of Istanbul’s few public parks to regime-connected “developers” turned up with some signs. Erdogan’s police attacked them with savage brutality. This grossly antidemocratic overreaction outraged a large section of the population and a wave of protest erupted that ultimately involved some 3 million people. Opposition on this scale posed a major challenge to the regime, but Erdogan stood his ground and eventually the opposition was extinguished; a lot of people seriously injured, thousands jailed and a few killed.
After Gezi the gagging of the media, repression of political critics, and the gutting of remaining institutional counterweights on the AKP, gained momentum. Next week’s referendum is designed to retroactively legitimize the autocratic regime that Erdogan has been running for the past few years.
Comrades who think we should have defended this regime last July have not had a lot to say about the state of Turkish “democracy” in recent years. Instead they offer general formulas and talk as if bourgeois democracy remains substantially intact. But this is not the case, as pretty much every serious observer agrees.
Perhaps you think that all the reports of attacks on leftists, on the media, and on minorities are exaggerated? Perhaps you think that Erdogan won the November 2015 election more or less legitimately? Perhaps you are not overly concerned about the “granular” details. But you should be, because your version of reality is contradicted by almost all of the bourgeois media—not to mention the entire spectrum of the Turkish left. Do you think that the liberal Huffington Post and Foreign Policy are linked to conservative finance capitalist mouthpieces like the Economist in some giant conspiracy to unfairly disparage Erdogan?
We posted a carefully documented analysis to DISC. What did we get back? An opinion piece which essentially ignored the facts we presented, and quoted two sources: Josh and Christoph. I suspect the reason that we got a “fact-free” response was because when the comrades looked for substantiation of their position, they could not find any. Which is hardly surprising because, contrary to Adaire and Barbara’s assertion, Erdogan does not in fact “rest on bourgeois democracy.” He rests on the knives and guns of his Ottoman Hearth thugs, as well of course as his control of the Turkish state machine with its cops, jailers and military.
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None of us are experts on the Middle East or Turkey. So when we began this discussion for me it was an open question as to what we might find. But there is a reality, and the facts are clear.
In 1979 Robertson and rest of the leadership of the Spartacist tendency demonstrated their Trotskyist credentials by refusing to climb aboard the mullahs’ bandwagon. Instead the SL warned of the “deadly threat to the Iranian proletariat” posed by a movement “identical to that of other Islamic fundamentalist groupings in the Near and Middle East such as…[Morsi and Erdogan’s] Muslim Brotherhood.” Instead of hailing Khomeini’s mass movement the SL proclaimed “Down with the Shah! No Support to Khomeini! Workers to Power!” This was one of the great contributions of the revolutionary Spartacist tendency –and it is every bit as applicable today as it was in Iran in the 1970s. It is a vital part of our revolutionary heritage—and we must not abandon it!
APPENDIX (excerpt from letter to Workers Power, 5 May 1988, reprinted in Trotskyist Bulletin No. 3, emphasis added)
Khomeini and the “Anti-Imperialist” United Front
A similar methodology is evident in your [Workers Power] support to Khomeini’s movement in Iran in 1979. You assert:
“Your position on Iran and your refusal to support the anti-Shah movement led by the mullahs is the fruit of your abandonment of Leninism. You remained neutral here (and in the Malvinas war) in a real conflict between a national movement of an oppressed nation and its oppressors…Leninists support struggles against imperialism in spite of the reactionary role of the `anti-imperialist bourgeoisie’.”
You assure us that you have no illusions in Khomeini but that in supporting his movement you were implementing the “anti-imperialist united front.” But Khomeini’s movement was in no sense a national movement against imperialism–it was a movement which sought to protect and restore the privileges and authority of the traditional rulers of Iran against the unpopular and brittle regime of the “modernizing” Shah. There is no necessary or fundamental conflict between Islamic theocracy and world imperialism.
The roots of your error on Iran were not located at the level of a mistaken appreciation of the class character of Islamic fundamentalism. What you exhibited was the classic centrist impulse to follow along behind “mass movements.” The correct and necessary task of revolutionists, which was carried out to our knowledge only by the Spartacist tendency (of which we were then a part), was to warn the Iranian workers of the inevitably reactionary consequences of Khomeini in power and to seek to rally them in opposition to the mullahs as well as the Shah. The fundamental axis of this orientation was captured in the slogan “Down with the Shah; Down with the Mullahs; Workers to Power in Iran!”
Let us recall how you actually supported the illusions of the masses in January 1979:
“Islamic ideology is Janus-faced. It can justify anti-imperialism, resistance to the foreign powers seeking to exploit or dismember the states of the Middle East. It can also justify black reaction–the suppression of the working class and poor peasantry. The inner connection is that like all religions it defends private property. As long as the possessing classes of the imperialised nation feel the major threat to their property to lie with imperialism then they can play a vigorous role in the struggle against it. Islamic ideology will then have a `progressive’ populist colouration and orientation. When the working class or small peasants become a serious threat not only to imperialism but to the native larger property owners it can become a cloak for bonapartist military dictatorship…”
A centrist night in which all cows are black. We might paraphrase your formula as follows: Islamic ideology (preservation of the privileges of the clerical hierarchy and possessing classes; social slavery for women; the extermination of homosexuals and the eradication of the left, etc.) can have a progressive, anti-imperialist orientation until the plebian strata mobilized behind it begin to threaten the traditional social hierarchy–whereupon it assumes a reactionary character. If Khomeini’s Iran proves anything, it is that Islamic ideology is a vehicle for the social subordination of the workers and poor peasants to the “native larger property owners.” Your policy of “support [to] the anti-Shah movement led by the mullahs” is completely anti-Trotskyist. The lessons drawn by Trotsky from the Chinese Communist Party’s prostration before the Kuomintang apply in all their force to your position on the mullahs’ theocratic movement:
“The false course of the Comintern was based on the statement that the yoke of international imperialism is compelling all `progressive’ classes to go together. In other words, according to the Comintern’s Stalinist theory, the yoke of imperialism would somehow change the laws of the class struggle.”
Khomeini made no secret of his intentions–as early as 1941 he was calling for the establishment of an “Islamic government” in Iran:
“If just one article of the Constitution were to be implemented, that specifying that all laws contrary to the shari’a are invalid, everyone in the country would join together in harmony….
“We know that all this is unpalatable to those who have grown up with lechery, treachery, music and dancing, and a thousand other varieties of corruption. Of course, they regard the civilization and advancement of the country as dependent upon women going naked in the streets, or to quote their own idiotic words, turning half the population into workers by unveiling them….They will not agree to the country’s being administered rationally and in accordance with God’s law.”
In 1963 Khomeini was still railing against the Shah’s regime–but we imagine that it is difficult, even for you, to find a “`progressive’ colouration” in comments like the following:
“I have repeatedly pointed out that the government has evil intentions and is opposed to the ordinances of Islam. One by one, the proofs of its enmity are becoming clear. The Ministry of Justice has made clear its opposition to the ordinances of Islam by various measures like the abolition of the requirement that judges be Muslim and male; henceforth, Jews, Christians, and the enemies of Islam and the Muslims are to decide on affairs concerning the honor and person of the Muslims.”
The victory of Khomeini’s Islamic movement meant the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, and the substitution for the Iranian masses of one form of capitalist enslavement for another. Yet Workers Power ludicrously insists that what was going on was “a real conflict between a national movement of an oppressed nation and its oppressors.”
The capitulation to the “Islamic Revolution” was capped by a policy of military support to Khomeini’s regime when the Iran- Iraq war broke out. This shameful record is not expunged by the fact that Workers Power eventually found it expedient to withdraw its support from Khomeini’s holy war (in company with virtually every other ostensibly Trotskyist current which had promoted the “revolutionary dynamic” of the mullahs in the heady days of the mass mobilizations).
[In the months that followed the April 2017 conference Riley and Mikl continued to discuss issues that had arisen during the debate over Erdogan.]