Council of State Day in Akbelen and the Anatomy of a Dispossession

Whose Public?

Council of State day in Akbelen and the anatomy of a dispossession

Dear Young Comrades,

First the news, then the lesson. I will tell you what happened in Ankara today; then why this case is not only the case of Milas's seven villages, but of all of us.

Where things stand: 16 September 2026, 6th Chamber of the Council of State

This morning at 09.30 the Akbelen case was heard in the 6th Chamber of the Council of State (Danıştay). The matter is a request to annul the 9 January 2026 presidential decision on the "urgent expropriation" (acele kamulaştırma) of 679 parcels of olive groves and farmland along the borders of seven villages in Milas, Muğla — İkizköy, Karacahisar, Çamköy, Bağdamları and Çakıralan foremost among them — for a lignite mine.

The hearing is over; no ruling was announced. The Council of State will serve its decision on the merits later; no date was given. So as of today there is no result of which one can say "won" or "lost." The file is at the decision stage.

In the morning the İkizköy mukhtar Nejla Işık, villagers, lawyers and political representatives made a statement in front of the Council of State: "The precedent ruling to be given here today will be hope for everyone." After the hearing the villagers went to the door of the General Directorate of Mining and Petroleum Affairs (MAPEG), attached to the Ministry of Energy, and set up a "villagers' rostrum". From the courtroom to the ministry door: the change of place itself is a lesson; we will return to it.

The legal line of the process so far is this:

The 6th Chamber of the Council of State stayed execution on 28 April 2026 (served 5 May). The ground matters: "energy supply security and economic grounds may support an ordinary expropriation; but the condition of urgency that urgent expropriation requires has not been met." Thereupon the Milas 2nd Civil Court of First Instance, in July, issued a decision to stay the 649 seizure and valuation cases proceeding in the company's name until the Council of State ruling becomes final. The fields have not yet been seized; there is no finalised ruling.

Then the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office of the Council of State stepped in and wrote in its opinion: "If the expropriation is not carried out, the plants may stop in 2027; this threatens energy supply security." The plaintiffs' lawyers Arif Ali Cangı and İpek Sarıca answered with a thirteen-page objection: even on 30 June 2026, Turkey's highest day of electricity consumption, the Yeniköy and Kemerköy plants met 1.36 percent of total consumption. The 10 September joint report of the Chambers of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers points the same way: the three plants in the region are 1.43 percent of Turkey's installed capacity; the Aegean Region produces 24.8 percent more electricity than it consumes.

There is also a criminal case running outside this file. Esra Işık, daughter of the mukhtar Nejla Işık, was detained during the expert inspection of the fields on 30–31 March 2026, charged with "resisting in order to prevent the performance of duty," and remanded; at the first hearing on 11 May she was released under judicial control; on 6 July the Milas 3rd Criminal Court of First Instance gave her 2 years and 1 month in prison and a 44,000-lira judicial fine. We wrote that case separately in July; today's piece may be counted as its continuation. That a villager objecting to the expropriation of a field is written down with the crime of "resisting the state" is a small but telling piece of this story.

That is the news. Now look closely at this picture.

Three questions

The name of this case is an "expropriation case." Inside that word there is "the public." So let us ask three questions, and not answer in haste.

From whom is the expropriated land taken, and to whom is it given?
If this is "public interest," why is the public at the courthouse door and in front of the ministry?
Why is the state in a hurry?

To answer, one must first look at the chronology. Because Akbelen did not begin today; we are in the last act of a twelve-year process.

Chronology: Twelve Years, One Line

2014. The Yeniköy and Kemerköy thermal plants were privatised to the IC İçtaş–Limak partnership for 2 billion 671 million dollars. The decision was published in the Official Gazette on 27 August 2014. This is the starting point of the story: public property was transferred to private capital.

2019. The Milas Forestry Operation Directorate declared the Akbelen Forest an "industrial plantation site." In December the villagers objected with a petition of 800 signatures.

November 2020. The 740-hectare Akbelen Forest was allocated to YK Enerji under the signature of the then Minister of Agriculture and Forestry. The General Directorate of Forestry had counted 93 percent of the area as "industrial-function."

July 2021. The people of İkizköy filed suit in the Muğla 1st Administrative Court and began a watch in the forest. Some hundred trees had already gone in the first cut; the watch stopped the cutting for two years.

24 July 2023. Cutting began again, accompanied by the gendarmerie. The court had refused a stay of execution for the third time. Detentions, pepper gas, villagers embracing trees: that week Akbelen was cut into Turkey's memory. On 8 August a motion for a general debate on the matter in the Grand National Assembly was rejected by the votes of the government.

12 March 2024. The first urgent-expropriation decision: 190 parcels, some 2.6 million square metres of farmland in İkizköy, Çamköy and Karacahisar. The forest was gone; the fields were next.

June 2024. The most telling document of this line. YK Enerji wrote a letter to the Privatisation Administration. Three demands: that the "loss" it had suffered because of resistance and lawsuits (it had calculated 1.9 billion lira) be made good; that the olive groves also be brought within the project; that the price mechanism be updated in the company's favour. In the same report there is another figure: the "capacity mechanism" payment the company took from the state in 2023 alone, 455 million 780 thousand lira; the 2018–2024 total, 1 billion 364 million lira. Keep this figure in mind.

July 2025. Law no. 7554 opened the way for olive groves to be used for mining. What the company had asked for by letter a year earlier became law.

9 January 2026. The second urgent-expropriation decision: 679 parcels in seven villages. Published in the Official Gazette on 10 January. The villagers filed 93 separate suits.

30–31 March 2026. Expert inspection, detentions, Esra Işık remanded.

28 April 2026. The Council of State stayed execution.

6 July 2026. Esra Işık: 2 years and 1 month in prison and a judicial fine. (Our piece)

16 September 2026. The hearing. A ruling is awaited.

Now see the line: privatisation → forest allocation → cutting → field → olive grove → law → urgent expropriation. At every step the name of what is taken changes; who takes it does not. In twelve years the one thing that has not changed is which way property flows.

Look closely at the word "expropriation"

Young comrades, learn to watch words; the ruling class does its largest work with words.

Expropriation, by definition, is the passage of private property to the state for the public interest. If your field is expropriated for a school, a road, a hospital, your field becomes society's. Is that what is happening in Akbelen?

No. The land expropriated in Akbelen is, through MAPEG, being joined to the mine of a private company in order to meet the coal need of two plants privatised in 2014. The land is taken from the villager; it pauses for a moment in the state's hand; then it goes under the excavator of the Limak–IC İçtaş partnership.

So the right name for this operation is not expropriation. Its name is privatisation by the hand of the state. More precisely: the transfer of small property to large property by the state's apparatus of force.

Comrade, grasp the movement here. In 2014 the state sold its own property to the company. When the company's business did not run, this time it took the villager's property and gave it to the company. The two operations have different names; the direction is the same.

Marx, in the last chapters of the first volume of Capital, recounting primitive accumulation, writes how the English peasant was torn from the common lands by enclosure. The mechanism there was in two parts: law and force. Parliament passed the enclosure acts; the gendarmerie put up the fence. In Akbelen the law is 7554, the force is 24 July 2023. Two hundred years have passed; the method has not changed.

But see one difference clearly: the primitive accumulation Marx told was happening at the birth of capitalism. In Akbelen it is happening inside a mature, monopolised capitalism. This shows that the "primitive" stage of accumulation has not ended; as the rate of profit tightens, capital encloses again whatever is not yet commodified (the forest, the olive grove, the water, the villager's land). David Harvey calls this "accumulation by dispossession." In plain language: finding something new to steal.

"Public interest" — whose interest?

Let us return to the opinion of the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office of the Council of State: "If the expropriation is not carried out, the plants may stop in 2027; this threatens supply security."

Who is the subject of this sentence? It says "supply security"; but supply security is an abstraction; it carries light to no one's house. The concrete question is this: if the two plants stop, whose loss is it?

We have the figure. Even on Turkey's highest day of consumption these two plants met 1.36 percent of total consumption. The remaining 98.64 percent came from elsewhere. The Aegean produces a quarter more than it consumes. The claim "we will be left without electricity" fails under a calculator.

Then who loses if the plants stop? The company. And what the company's loss is, the company itself wrote in the June 2024 letter: some half a billion lira a year from the capacity mechanism. The capacity mechanism is money the plant takes from the state for "standing ready," independent of the electricity it produces. So these two plants make money not by the electricity they produce but by existing. And the condition of existing is coal; the condition of coal is the villager's field.

Now rebuild the sentence "public interest": The state seizes the villager's field so that a private plant to which it pays a subsidy from its own budget can keep taking the subsidy; and it calls this public interest.

"Public interest," in this case, is another name for a company's balance sheet.

That is the meaning of the slogan the villagers shouted today in front of the Council of State: "We are the public, Akbelen is ours." This is not an expression of feeling; it is a class objection to a legal concept. The public is not a ministry's door. The public is the people who pick olives in that field, drink that water, breathe the smoke of that plant.

And the smoke has a balance sheet too: according to the report in the lawyers' objection, the plants cause some 140 premature deaths a year. The sentence Tayibe Demirel from Yatağan spoke in front of the Council of State is that figure in human form: "We live with cancer and respiratory disease from the thermal-plant smoke." Who pays this cost? It is the one item that does not enter the balance sheet. Capital privatises the profit and socialises the cost; in Akbelen the name of the cost is the lung.

The hurry of what hurry?

Third question: why is the state in a hurry?

Article 27 of the Expropriation Law defines "urgent expropriation" as an exceptional instrument: a state of war, an extraordinary situation, work in which delay would be harmful. In ordinary expropriation the owner objects to the price, the court values, then seizure follows. In urgent expropriation the order is reversed: first seizure, the price discussed later.

What the Council of State said on 28 April is exactly this: "There is no urgency." The stay of execution does not deny that supply security may be a ground for ordinary expropriation; but it says the word "urgent" has no legal counterpart.

Then whose hurry is the hurry? The answer is again in the company's letter. A company that says it has lost 1.9 billion lira because of resistance and lawsuits is a company that writes every passing month as a cost. It is not the state that is in a hurry; it is capital; the state has turned that hurry into a legal adjective. The use of an instrument of the law of war for a company's cash flow: that is the meaning of urgent expropriation in Akbelen.

There is a symbolic side as well. In 2023, when the trees were cut, the gendarmerie was "there." In 2026 the team that went to the field for the expert inspection was "on duty"; the villager who objected was "resisting in order to prevent the performance of duty." We wrote, evaluating the İHD report: the state is absent in the factory, present in the square. In Akbelen too it is absent at the field's edge, present beside the inspection team. This asymmetry is not an accident; it is a function.

Official narrative / Class reading

Official narrative	Class reading
"Expropriation"	The transfer of small property to monopoly capital by state force; not expropriation, indirect privatisation
"Public interest"	The coal need and capacity-mechanism income of two plants privatised in 2014
"Energy supply security"	1.36 percent on the peak day; the Aegean produces a surplus; the claim does not stand up to a calculator
"Urgent"	The company's cash flow; an instrument of the law of war used for a balance sheet
"Resisting in order to prevent the performance of duty"	Counting as a crime the objection of a villager whose field is being seized
"Energy production"	~140 premature deaths a year; profit private, cost social
"Investment climate"	The confession that resistance has cost the company 1.9 billion lira: that is, resistance works

What is being covered over?

There is one side in this debate whose name is never mentioned: the plant and mine workers.

In Yeniköy and Kemerköy, in the mine, there are workers employed for this work, taking their wages from this company. The ruling narrative sets them against the villagers: "If the plant closes, the workers will be unemployed." This is capital's oldest game; a divided class, busy with its inner quarrel, looks at no one as the boss.

Our answer must be clear: the opposition between the plant worker's job and the villager's land is not natural; it is constructed. What constructs it is that the plan of production is set by profit. That the coal will run out in 2027, the company knows and the ministry knows. There is no public transition programme planned until that date; neither for the worker nor for the villager. Both will "look after themselves." One side's loss of a field does not guarantee the other side's job; it only wins the company a few more years.

That is why Akbelen's right demand does not end with "close the plant." The right demand is this: the plants return to the public, the timetable of closure be made together with the workers, the workers be given public job security and re-employment, the villager's land stay with the villager. The name of this is a just transition, and its only genuine subject is organised labour. Neither the ministry, nor the company, nor the villager alone can build it.

The second thing covered over: water. A 2005 report by the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ) says coal mining will adversely affect the region's groundwater system. The lawyers' petition writes that the mine threatens Bodrum's drinking-water sources. An olive is not a one-year crop; a cut tree does not come back, salinated water does not return. The logic of urgent expropriation that says "compensation will be paid" is an accounting that tries to put a price on what cannot be undone.

From the courtroom to the ministry door

The most important image of today, I think, was not the hearing but what came after: the villagers left the Council of State, walked to MAPEG, and set up a rostrum.

This is a change of place, and there is an intuition in it. The Council of State has so far twice ruled for the villagers; on 28 April it stayed execution, today it heard the merits. These are not gains to be slighted. But read the twelve-year chronology again: what stopped the cutting for two years in 2021 was not the court; it was the watch. After the court said "no" for the third time, the gendarmerie came. When the company wrote the ground of the 1.9 billion lira it recorded as "loss," it counted not the lawsuits but the "resistance movements."

So legal struggle is necessary but not sufficient. The court puts on paper the balance of forces built in the street; it does not create that force. That the villagers finished not at the Council of State's door but at MAPEG's shows they know where the decision is given.

Law is the minutes of the balance of forces. To change the minutes, one must first change the balance.

See this as well: today it was not only the people of İkizköy in front of the Council of State. There were ecology platforms, chambers of engineers, political parties from Yatağan, from other villages of Muğla, from Izmir. Two chambers of TMMOB wrote a technical report. This means a single village's case has become a regional case. Every new enclosure by capital draws closer those left outside the fence. This is the one law that works in our favour; but it does not work of itself.

What is this to you?

Young comrades, you may say "an olive grove in Milas, what is it to me." You may not; I will write why.

The mechanism in Akbelen is not applied only to an olive grove. The same state–capital compound, with the same sentence of "public interest," with the same urgent instruments, is at work for gold in the Kaz Mountains, for hydroelectric plants in the Black Sea, for urban transformation in the city, for campus land at the university, even, as we wrote looking at KVKK, in your data. The object changes; the method does not: to turn, by the hand of the state, in the name of public interest, what is not yet a commodity into a commodity.

What is "urgent" in Akbelen today will tomorrow be "urban transformation" in your neighbourhood, "restructuring" at your workplace, a "user agreement" on your phone. The rule is the same: a rule binds everyone; a rule broken in one place is broken everywhere. If it is settled that urgent expropriation can be used for a company in Akbelen, that becomes a precedent; for the next village, for the next neighbourhood.

That is why, when Nejla Işık said "a precedent ruling will be hope for everyone," she was saying something precisely legal. And that is why, while we wait for the ruling the Council of State will give today, we must not forget where the real decision is given.

Concrete Tasks

A diagnosis is not a programme. Let us be concrete.

Follow the ruling. When the 6th Chamber of the Council of State's decision on the merits is served, read the grounds; not only the result. The grounds are the weapon of the next case.
Correct the word. When "expropriation" is said around you, ask: from whom is it taken, to whom is it given? This single question moves the ground of the debate from morals to property.
Memorise the figure. 1.36 percent. When you hear the sentence "we will be left without electricity," say this figure; give the source. One figure is more persuasive than an hour of argument.
Do not set the worker against you. Plant and mine workers are not the adversary of this struggle; they are a potential partner. Own the demand for a just transition; say not "close the plant" but "return it to the public, plan it together with its workers."
Localise. In your own province, your own district, how many urgent-expropriation decisions have been published in the last five years? Search the Official Gazette, list them, write in whose favour they are. A local list does more work than a national news story.
Learn the capacity mechanism. From Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK) data, work out which plant the state pays, how much, in return for what. "Public interest" cannot be debated without knowing where the public budget flows.
If you are a computing worker, take on the technical load. Build an open data set that brings together expropriation decisions, capacity payments, case chronologies. The scatter of data is in capital's favour; gathered data is ours.
Learn the watch. The Akbelen watch has been running for more than five years. Find someone who knows how it was organised, who went when, the logistics, the legal support, and listen. The life of a resistance is measured not by its fervour but by its organisation.
Connect. Name Akbelen in the same sentence as the Kaz Mountains, the hydroelectric plants, urban transformation. To speak of each as a separate "environmental issue" is the division capital wants.
Organise. For a demand to find an addressee, organised force must stand behind it. A union, an association, an ecology platform, an assembly; whichever is at hand. The reason Akbelen is in the Council of State today is not a petition; it is five years of organised watch.

Dear Comrades,

Today no ruling was announced at the Council of State. It will be announced in a few weeks or a few months. If it comes out for the villager, it will be the greatest gain of twelve years; but the excavator will try to come to the field again, because the coal is there and the capacity payment is there. If it comes out against, the watch will continue; because the watch did not begin with a court ruling, and will not end with one.

In both cases the lesson to be learned is the same: do not leave the word "public" to the ruling class. The public is not the name of a ministry; it is our common name. That is exactly what the villagers of Akbelen said when they stepped up to the rostrum.