Serdar Okan
It’s a river that flows…
“… When asked what were the political developments that made Baba Erdogan so great and so symbolic in the ranks of the proletarian.
Response:
Although the oppressed minority belongs to the milleye and faith, it is not the case that it handles every struggle from a class perspective…
Initiative in will and actions…
Spreading love and respect to the underdog front…
Tolerant of his comrades and comrades in the trenches, as well as ruthless towards the enemy…
Class opposition to imprisonment in dungeons under all circumstances…
Planned and fast style in actions…
To implement the party line and discipline in the people’s world…
He has gained the respect and love of all segments in the class struggles, fields and organizations in which he has fought all his life.
Baba Erdogan organized every field as a class war in the disciplined and proceive struggle within the Party and had a staff that embodied the theory and practical harmony of the People’s War, which has not yet come to light with its stable and decisive stance. Every development and contradiction is symbolized by the effort to create new positions and spaces from „masses to masses“.
Guardhouse raids in … The Kandıra Türkisch Army raid… We can note that he is a Communist leader who made his first landing in the Black Sea at the head of the guerrilla war and guerrilla unit that formed the carotid artery of the liberation of the peoples of the country.
Baba Erdogan is an indomitable leader of the strategy of popular war. Baba Erdogan is the revolutionary communist leader who has written his name in capital letters in the history of our country’s revolution and armed struggle.
Master of peasant guerrilla warfare in the countryside, he is the commander of the armed propagandist who shook the dead ashes of the Pacification that covered the masses in the cities.
Childhood years:
Baba Erdogan was born on January 2, 1960 in Sırtkan, a mountain village in the Hozat district of Dersim, according to population records. He was the 6th of 8 children of a poor Dersim family. His childhood years were spent listening to the memories of the 1937/38 genocide and the subsequent massacre. He started school in 1968 when the primary school opened in the villages of Babylon (his real name), which grew up listening to the memories of the resistance period of his grandparents. Since his older brothers settled in other cities due to both their business and university education, Babylon went to school and did the daily work in the village, harvesting crops in the field and shepherding in the mountains… Like all the other Dersm youths.
After finishing Babil primary school in his village, he went to his older brother in Elazig in 1973 and started secondary school. The secondary school he attended, formerly known as revolution middle school, is a school where the fight against fascists is intense. Babil meets revolutionary thoughts for the first time here. He begins to sympathize with Dev-Genç. During this period, he started boxing courses due to his interest in sports. Babylon is now one of the prominent figures in the fight against fascists at Revolution Secondary School.
Teenage years;
After graduating from secondary school in 1976, Babylon went to live with his other brother, a high school teacher in Erzurum Khorasan, to study high school. Shortly after he left, after his brother’s house was gunned down by fascists, his brother’s appointment was made in Istanbul. He enrolled at Izet Ünver high school in Gungoren, Istanbul, where he first came to Babylon. During this period, he sometimes stayed at his brother’s house, which was a high school teacher, while the Site, where his other brother, who was mostly a university student, stayed, made his own place in the student dormitory. Here, he meets the thoughts of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya in Istanbul, where he came as a Dev-Genç sympathizer, inspired by his brother, who is a student of Istanbul university, and his revolutionary friends around him. Babylon took his place in the partisan ranks in Taksim Square during the bloody events of May 1, 1977. When he returned to Hozat to study high school 2nd and 3rd grade, Babil is now a determined Partisan who defends Ibrahim Kaypakkaya’s ideas.
When he combines his charismatic personality with his naturalness and his playful side, he excels as a beloved leader in youth. While studying high school in Babylon, he rushes from action to action while doing the village work. During this period, he lost his mother in the fall of 1977, and later married. After finishing high school in 1979, he settled in the village due to his increasing responsibilities. On the one hand, he engages in village affairs, while on the other hand he is active as a forward sympathizer.
The occupation of the land takes place in the famous actions of the period, such as the eventful May Day action in Dersim. He lives in the village, so he’s in contact with the guerrilla. Orhan Bakır (Armenak Bakırjian), one of his beloved comrades, named his son Orhan, who was born immediately after he was worth the revolution in Karakoçan. As a forward sympathizer, he performs all his duties.
Active Party years;
Babylon joined the guerrilla in the summer of 1985 and is rapidly developing politically while slawing in its military direction. This period of intensification of conference discussions is also a period of heavy losses in the countryside. In 1987, when the Dabk – Conference segregation occurred within the TKP (ML), Babylon took his position in favor of the Dabk wing and in September 1987 he took his place as deputy secretary of the DABK within the Dabk management team. In the process that follows, he assumes the regional command, creating a leap in guerrilla practice after 1980, which consists only of punishing whistleblowers and sustaining casualties. In the fall of 1987, Hozat took successful actions such as the prison raid, the Cemisgezek military branch raid, and the destruction of the polling stations. In late December 1987, he came to the Marmara region under the responsibility of Manuel Demir to break this silence in the cities where the post-9/12 silence reigned and to make the name of our Party’s priority TKP (ML).
On January 10, 1988, He stormed the 196th infantry regiment with only one pistol with them as a weapon, along with an 8-member guerrilla unit of Party members, Party Candidate members and Advanced sympathizers. In the procession they enter at night, they take in soldiers and officers and confiscate weapons. The group under Manuel’s command takes the weapons and sets off, while the other group under Babylon stays in the regiment to buy time. Although he was wounded in the foot during the raid, they gave them revolution and party propaganda for several hours without mistreating the soldiers and officers. This incident affects soldiers who did not know the revolutionaries until then, and when they are called to the courts as witnesses in the following process, they will not identify Babylon in the courtroom. Outside the hall, they will express their respect for Babylon’s relatives. The operation, which began at the end of January with the unraveling of some sympathizers captured after another action, resulted in the shooting death of TKP (ML) Leader Manuel Demir and the capture of Baba Erdogan. In the early days of his arrest, Baba Erdogan was not considered in custody and fake news appeared on the front pages of daily newspapers that he had escaped seriously injured after a shootout in a cell house. Thus, like Manuel’s comrade, the ground is set to kill Babylon. In the police, he’s told he’s going to be slaughtered like Manuel. During this period, both his family and our comrades launched an active campaign at home and abroad, carrying the loss of Baba Erdogan in custody to the press and the public with various actions and occupations. Thus, the Istanbul Police are forced to explain that they have baba. then the prison process begins.
Baba Erdogan defended the TKP (ML) against the counter-revolutionary forces by adopting an active line of resistance and defense, such as his leader, Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, during the police and post-trial court process. During the prison process, he gained the respect and trust not only of his comrades, but also of other revolutionary structures.
Baba Erdogan, who is in prison, is in the perspective of desertion. The Prison Party prepares its organization in this direction. Desertion, strengthening the Party and opening the Black Sea to the guerrilla has become the dream of the Father and his comrades. With these thoughts, the Milkmen begin their research of weaknesses inside and outside the prison. After several unsuccessful tunnel attempts, he is embezzled by the administration to the guards.
Baba Erdogan is actively involved in party issues as well as desertion. Prison is a camp where fighters and sympathizers, especially members of the Party, are ideologically trained and theoretical and political studies are carried out carefully in this context. Everyone inside is shaped by the perspective of the Mountain and the armed struggle. In this process, Baba Erdogan focuses on research and investigations on the development of the Party Union, developments in Kurdistan and the development of the People’s War for the defense and party conference held on behalf of the Party in the Kanka case held with the CPK and DGM. It does the work that is the basis of the army charter. At the DABK 3rd conference in 1989, the party appointed Baba Erdogan as an honorary member. During this period, he submits concrete proposals for the unity of TKP (ML) forces in his articles delivered to the Central Committee. On the one hand, „one lesson is not enough, the target is a thousand lessons“, and first of all, he starts infrastructure works while he is still in prison to open the Black Sea region to guerrilla struggle.
In May 1990, with an act of desertion organized by the Revolutionary Left, together with four Revolutionary Left leaders, including Dursun Karatas and Ibrahim Erdogan, they escaped from Bayrampasa prison in a way that the state could not solve its secret. When the father arrives in Dersim, while the state forces are unaware of his escape for days, he commands the siege of the military unit under the command of a captain in the village of Ovacik Çalbasi on June 1, 1990. Fascist TC forces become so weak that they cannot leave the village houses, shielding the villagers from themselves during the day. Baba Erdogan is a guerrilla so loved by the villagers of dersim that he was greeted with sacrifice in the 42 villages he went to after the prison break.
At the extraordinary meeting of the TKP (ML) MK held in June 1990, he was appointed deputy secretary general and a member of the MK – SB. In August 1990, Babylon immediately crossed into the Black Sea region (where he continued his infrastructure work while he was still in prison) and started the guerrilla struggle.
It marks a first in the history of TKP (ML) by opening a Guerrilla field in the Black Sea. In this region, after the land recognition and mass work of the guerrilla unit in a short time, it commands actions such as road cutting, identity control and Party propaganda in Sivas and Tokat, raiding state construction sites and confiscating tools and equipment such as dynamite. Although there are new joins to the guerrilla unit, there is a problem of arming. To solve this armament problem, on September 16, 1990, Tokat – Almus – raided the outpost of gümelonu village. This raid, in which a petty officer is killed and a soldier wounded, is the last raid on the Comrade of the Father. The father is taken away from the police station injured. The first statements were that the Father comrade was shot by an officer hiding in the back after entering the police station alone and receiving the soldiers, and that he was worth the revolution from the blood loss on the night of September 16-17. However, in 1996, after the Congress Preparedness Confederation, a new statement by the MK said: Baba Erdogan was shot in the back by agent Laz Nihat after taking in soldiers inside the police station.
Babylon, who opened his eyes to the world in a mountain village of Hozat in 1960, was buried on September 21, 1990, at the height of a high hill facing the Munzurs opposite the village, accompanied by slogans, with the participation of a large crowd in his village.
Baba Erdogan comrade Party is undoubtedly the most aggressive and political audacity of its own era in our history.
Turkey – Developed the Kurdistan revolution secularly as both a city guerrilla and a village guerrilla. During this period, all comrades who shouldered these great developments and carried them forward established the practice of the People’s War at the highest level in the revolution. And Baba Erdogan has been a symbol of how everything that the liquidator revisionist-rightoportunist chorus within the Party shouts ‚unenforceable‘, ‚unenforceable‘ can be done if there is Maoist leadership. Whenever the party acted under the guidance of Maoist cadres, it developed politically, militarily and massively; however, whenever the liquidator-revisionist-right opportunist chorus took over, there was a disorganization in the form of spontaneity, reformism, economicism and the distancing/removal of the masses from the Party.
During the periods led by mlms, the party’s strategy of the People’s War, which was discussed in three stages, in the first stage in the organization of more strategic defense and guerrilla regions, made the Party a practical war organization, primarily by arming it ideologically. As they opened up to new areas, they followed the tactic of establishing revolutionary bases in rural areas, accumulating power with armed propaganda and mass actions in cities, and waiting for opportunities. There has never been a ‚tactic‘ of MLMs in the history of the party to evacuate guerrilla areas and to move armed forces abroad en masse. This is a feature that begins in the emulators of Avenkian, Prachanda, Kruscev, Teng, who are more eager to overcome the masters. Today, those who are thrown from one side to the other between legalism and armed reformism are doomed to be erased from the stage of history as self-reliant, nomencturists, rather than communists.
However, despite the temporary effects of the liquidators, a significant number of the Party cadres and advanced sympathizers are shaped according to the People’s War… Still, years later, the staff and sympathizers of that period were in the ranks of the revolution and the indecive state of the revolution.
It salutes Baba Erdogan and the staff type of revolution embodied in his identity, which sheds light on the struggle of socialism and People’s Struggle with the perspective of the proletarian world revolution. We commemorate with gratitude and respect our comrades who sacrificed their lives.
As MKP, we promise to take their revolutionary ideals further by considering today’s conditions and developments from the perspective of reconstruction. We are their comrades. This steel won’t forget the water it took.
