The Cry of 'No to NATO': Chained Streets, Whitewashed Poverty, and the Memory of Resistance

Rage That Breaches the Barricades — Turkey Says "No to NATO!"

Look comrade, today I will describe an Ankara and a Turkey you will not see on mainstream media's glittering screens or on the fancy billboards of the state and bourgeois municipalities—a picture they hurriedly try to cover up. For months the rulers have hung "Ankara Is Ready for NATO!" banners across the city, assembling a chorus of subservience and surrender. Yet in these July days the real and noble voice echoing through Ankara's streets and every inch of the homeland is the "No to NATO!" cry that tears that fake chorus apart.

The order of capital is operating something like martial law against its own people to host blood-stained NATO generals, chiefs of international finance capital, and imperialism's global bullies in the capital. But there is one thing they did not calculate, comrade: this anger is too large to fit within Ankara's borders, protocol roads, or those glittering summit halls. Today the barricades rising against fascism, war, and exploitation are being erected not only in the capital but across all Turkey—from Istanbul's worker neighborhoods to Izmir's squares, from the gates of Adana Incirlik to Diyarbakır's streets!

The Chief of the Global Gang Is Not Wanted in Turkey: "Trump Get Out!"

What set the streets ablaze this July, what kept the masses standing upright against police plastic bullets and tear gas, is the embodied vision of imperialist barbarism. The workers, youth, and women of the homeland are not marching against an abstract "alliance"; they are taking to the streets against the chiefs at the head of this bloody machine—Donald Trump, the most unrestrained representative of monopolistic bourgeoisie, and his war partners setting foot on these lands.

The Legitimate Will of the Street: Youth standing at Dolmabahçe against American warships anchored in the Istanbul Strait and agricultural workers pressing the wire fences at the base in Adana united under one common banner: "Killer Trump Get Out of Turkey!" The summit rulers market as "strategic partnership" and "diplomatic success" is in the people's eyes nothing but a show of force by a global crime organization.

Come comrade; let us put on the table step by step, in full detail, the naked state violence behind this dirty siege, the names of our comrades held captive across Turkey, that two-faced makeup operation hiding poverty, and the misery of the bourgeois state trampling its own laws for imperialism's comfort.

Dawn Raids and the Balance Sheet of Captivity: Ankara Resisting in Cells

Comrade; today is 6 July 2026. The state terror deployed to crush popular anger against the NATO Siege in Ankara has as of today reached its most savage and most institutionalized phase. Hot data compiled from the joint press statement and crisis desk held today (6 July 2026) at 10:00 by the Contemporary Lawyers Association (ÇHD) Ankara Branch, the Freedom Advocates Association (ÖHD), and the Human Rights Association (İHD) Ankara Branch documents how bourgeois judiciary is running a total "hostage-taking" operation to please imperialist chiefs.

Let us expose name by name the anatomy of this balance sheet of captivity, operated to dehumanize the streets and smother the will opposing NATO's war apparatus before it is born, with technical and legal detail:

Numerical Distribution and Detention Centers as of 6 July 2026

Under investigation file 2026/14322 titled "Alleged NATO Summit Security Investigation," conducted by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office Terror Crimes Investigation Bureau, the empirical breakdown of dispossessed people and revolutionaries distributed to different prisons and detention centers across the city is as follows:

Detention / Arrest Status	Number of People	Center Held / Transferred To	Legal Pretext
Total Detention Operations	225	Ankara Security Directorate Counter-Terrorism (TEM) and Security Branch	Law No. 2911, Insulting the President, TMK 7/2
Formally Arrested	178	Sincan No. 1 and 2 F-Type High Security Prisons	"Organization Membership," "Damage to Public Property," "Inciting Public to Hatred and Enmity"
House Arrest (Electronic Shackle)	34	Individuals' Residences	Bans on Leaving Home and Using Digital Materials
Judicial Control / Travel Ban	13	Released (With Signature Requirement)	Police Station Signature 3 Days a Week

Comrades Resisting in Cells: Detailed Name and Identity File

As of the morning of 6 July 2026, the legal status and technical details of those who completed police statements and were transferred to Sincan Prison or filled their 4th day at the TEM branch—names forming the memory of anti-imperialist resistance—are as follows:

1. Pressure on the Academy: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emel Memiş

• Identity: Faculty member, Department of Economics, Faculty of Political Sciences (Mülkiye), Ankara University.
• Material Ground: Scientific article on how defense and NATO integration shares in 2026 budget spending increase the inflation burden on the people's backs, and signature campaign titled "Budget for the People, Not a War Budget."
• Current Status: Detained since the 23 June dawn raid; held in isolation at Sincan Women's Closed Prison.

2. Press Execution and Rights Defense: Yıldız Tar

• Identity: Journalist, Kaos GL Editor-in-Chief.
• Material Ground: Publishing raw footage of youth subjected to police torture in the street on social media and independent agencies, breaching Ankara Governorate's 13-day absolute action ban. Charged under the "Disinformation Law" ($Material: Censorship: Apparatus$).
• Current Status: Detention period at TEM Branch extended another 24 hours; attempts to block obtaining assault report.

3. Peak of State Paranoia: Nevzat Özer and TEMA Volunteers

• Identity: TEMA Foundation Ankara Provincial Representative and 42 foundation volunteers with him (ages 50–80).
• Material Ground: Organizing a pre-planned "Bird-Watching Trip" in the Mogan Lake basin near Ankara. Security bureaucracy coded this outdoor activity, 4 kilometers from the summit route, as "intelligence reconnaissance activity and potential autonomous action flare-up."
• Current Status: Following massive public reaction, 42 elderly volunteers were released late last night under judicial control; Nevzat Özer remains in detention on suspicion of "providing logistical ground for an organization."

4. Political Leaders: Burcu Arıkan and Elif Torun Öneren

• Identities: Burcu Arıkan (Umut-Sen Spokesperson), Elif Torun Öneren (United Revolutionary Party General Chair).
• Material Ground: Distributing "No to NATO, Capital's War Bear" leaflets to workers in Ostim and İvedik organized industrial zones, conducting anti-imperialist agitation in worker assemblies.
• Current Status: Detained as doors were broken down with battering rams; in Sincan Prison since 26 June.

5. Seizure of the Right to Defense: Atty. Semra Demir and Atty. Kürşat Bafra

• Identities: Two criminal defense lawyers, members of the Contemporary Lawyers Association (ÇHD).
• Material Ground: Forcing through barricades in Ankara Security Directorate Security Branch corridors on 23 June during the first detention wave to reach clients, recording police violence in minutes.
• Current Status: Arrested on charges of "resisting performance of duty" and "conducting activities on behalf of an organization." The right to defense has itself been taken hostage by bourgeois judiciary.

6. Youth and Mass Movement: Hediye Yıldırım and METU/Ankara University Students

• Identity: Hediye Yıldırım, Central Executive Board (GYK) member of People's Houses, and 14 student collective representatives from METU and Ankara University.
• Material Ground: Opening flash-mob style banner "Killer NATO Get Out, the One Postponing Our Exams" on Yüksel Avenue and Kızılay Square.
• Current Status: All referred to criminal peace court with arrest request; 12 students and Hediye Yıldırım arrested.

Legal Lawlessness and Isolation Conditions as of 6 July

The most dangerous technical detail reported this morning (6 July 2026) by lawyer organizations is the absolute application of Detention Entry Restriction (Power of Attorney Limit) and the 24-Hour Lawyer Visit Ban.

Suspension of Law: Ankara TEM Branch is operating an administrative scheme rivaling State of Emergency (OHAL) period practices to sever our detained comrades' connection with the outside world. Cell ventilation covers have been closed; access to medicine and clean water restricted. To show the city "smooth and clean" to blood-stained NATO generals, the bourgeois state has thrown its own legal texts in the trash and declared a naked state of exception ($State: of: Exception$) regime.

The Common Front of Resistance: Political Parties and Mass Organizations' "No to NATO" Manifesto

Comrade; while the state's police, prosecutors, and regime actors like Mansur Yavaş join hands to dehumanize the streets, Turkey's revolutionary movement and the working class's democratic mass organizations responded to this blockade with a tremendous ideological barricade. These statements completely censored and virtually erased by bourgeois media are a class rebuff against imperialism, local collaborators, and the monopolistic war gang crystallized in the person of Donald Trump.

Let us compile the common messages of political parties and anti-imperialist organizations rising from every corner of the homeland and shattering this siege, with their political-economic essence:

The Class Rebuke of Socialist and Communist Parties

Labor Party (EMEP): "Budget for Workers, Not the War Budget!"

EMEP, focusing on the economic and union cost of the NATO siege, exposed the direct link between July raises seized from the working class and imperialism's military spending:

"The mind that tells millions of workers, civil servants, and pensioners 'there is no budget' and grants misery wages mobilizes all the city's resources for NATO generals' comfort. Every ton of asphalt poured, every coat of fake plaster applied for Trump and his war partners is bread cut from the worker's throat. We have not a single penny to sacrifice to imperialists' war, not a single child to send to their front!"

Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP): "Those Who Should Be Tried Are the Killers, Not Those in the Streets!"

TİP, drawing attention to mass arrest terror in Ankara and constitutional rights trampled underfoot, laid bare bourgeois judiciary's misery:

"The dictatorship law that arrested 178 of our comrades exercising constitutional protest rights, threw our professors and lawyers into cells is null and void. If anyone in this country is to be tried, it is not the honorable people in the streets saying 'No to NATO' but killer Donald Trump, who has bathed the Middle East and the world in blood, and his local collaborators."

Left Party: "Independent Turkey, NATO Get Out!"

The Left Party, following the revolutionary tradition that stood against the 6th Fleet, targeted regime parties' hypocrisy with a mass anti-imperialist front call:

"All actors of bourgeois politics, in power and opposition, have entered a race to fall in line before Trump. Those closing Ankara to the people and opening it to killers want to liquidate this homeland's independence mortar. But they forgot one thing: This country's streets never bowed to imperialism and will not today. The only path is an independent, revolutionary Turkey!"

Communist Party of Turkey (TKP): "NATO Is a Massacre Network, Close the Bases!"

In its statement against the summit in Ankara, TKP grasped the matter directly with historical roots. The statement emphasized that NATO is a counter-revolution apparatus built against working-class gains:

"The crime organization gathered in Ankara is the executive board of financial capital rising on the blood and tears of world peoples. Those who turn our country into the logistical base of this bloody network are those who steal the people's bread and pour it into imperialists' bombs. All foreign bases, especially Incirlik and Kürecik, must be immediately nationalized and NATO soldiers driven from these lands!"

The Cry of Democratic Mass Organizations and the Union Front

People's Houses: "Our Future Cannot Be Killers' Logistics!"

People's Houses, showing militant resistance in the streets and with Central Executive Board members arrested, brought the anger of youth whose exams were canceled to the podium:

"Those who erased AGS and ÖABT exams determining our youth's future in one stroke have clothed themselves in imperialism's servitude. Our cities, our universities are not killers' logistical bases. This country's youth will neither surrender to NATO's mercenary orders nor to fascistic bans dehumanizing cities."

KESK, DİSK, and TMMOB Joint Declaration: "The Struggle for Peace and Bread Is Common"

Labor and professional organizations protested the city's physical plunder and administrative martial law in their joint statement:

"You cannot hide complicity by imposing forced leave on public employees in Ankara, paralyzing transport, and whitewashing the city's poor buildings with fake paint. The common will of engineers, architects, workers, and all public employees is for peace. The NATO alliance is the enemy of labor. We will grow the struggle for peace and bread against this mentality that pours the class budget into war."

The Common Denominator of the Messages' Political Economy

Comrade; when we place side by side the voices rising from all these different organizations, the common ideological line the bourgeois state and its local implementers like Mansur Yavaş try to crush crystallizes:

• Rejection of Imperialist Dependence: No left/socialist formation sees NATO as a "defense alliance"; all code it directly as finance capital's colonial whip.
• Trump Symbol: Trump, chief of US imperialism, is not merely a military figure but stands as the common target board as the most unrestrained barbarism symbol of monopolistic bourgeoisie, mortal enemy of the world working class.
• Budget Synthesis: All formations have exposed exploitation by linking the city's cosmetic embellishment with the people's absolute impoverishment ($Pauperization$).

This common manifesto is what the rulers fear most, comrade. The great truth they try to hide behind numbers and bans is being woven street by street with this collective will.

Makeup of Class Shame: Painting Poverty, Plastering Over Nakedness

Look comrade, bourgeois ideology does not operate only in courtrooms, police detention centers, or television studios; it expresses itself most concretely and spatially in the city's architecture, stone, and concrete. When Karl Marx described how the capitalist mode of production remakes space in its own image and according to its own needs, he drew attention to spatial alienation. This latest "makeup operation" in Ankara is the most wretched, most naked sign of the moral and class shame the capitalist class feels toward the social misery it itself created.

Normally the state and municipal bureaucracy that offers "insufficient budget" or "austerity measures" as excuse for this people's crumbling sidewalks, potholed roads, dry taps, and neighborhood ruins resembling rubble; the moment blood-stained NATO chiefs' planes touch down at Esenboğa, miraculously allocates a huge budget to brushes, paint, and plaster.

Hypocrisy of the Protocol Road: One-Faced Whitewash Politics

The most striking and dialectical example of this cosmetic censorship occurred on the famous Protocol Road from Esenboğa Airport to the city center and in worker neighborhoods around summit centers. Bourgeoisie built something like a modern Potemkin Village (fake facades) to hide the city's real face from imperialist masters.

• Front Painted, Back Collapsed Houses: Only the street-facing front facades of old housing, shanties, and worker apartment blocks along the route were hastily plastered and painted in luxurious, sterile colors. So generals' and diplomats' eyes behind luxury black bulletproof convoys would not be offended! Not a single brushstroke touched the backs of houses—the real living spaces where worker families live, crumbling, cracking, smelling of damp.
• Lives Covered by Panels: Poverty nodes too deep for paint and plaster to save were physically screened with huge glittering NATO advertisement panels and "Strong Alliance" posters. The working class's reality was literally buried behind walls and panels with imperialist war organization's propaganda.

Class Anatomy of the Budget: People vs. Imperialism

The budget and overtime paradox here is a wonderful political-economic litmus test showing which master the state apparatus truly serves. Let us summarize the situation with this objective contrast:

"Those who for years said 'no funds' for infrastructure problems the people suffered, exploding sewers—have the power to work all the city's plaster and paint workers overtime until midnight for a 10-second view a foreign general will make from behind tinted glass."

City's Normal State (Face Turned to the People)	NATO Siege State (Face Turned to Masters)
Neighborhood roads unrepaired for months, full of potholes.	"Fast-drying" special asphalt laid in 48 hours, smooth.
Damp, crumbling, uninsulated worker housing.	Fake shop windows with only front facade painted in bourgeois pastels.
Street lamps cut or unlit on "austerity" grounds.	Summit-focused giant projectors and security lights turning night into day.

Does Plastering Over Nakedness Save the Order?

This painting frenzy actually shows bourgeoisie's psychological split and fear, comrade. They do not want to eliminate poverty; they want to punish and censor poverty's visibility. They think they can make capitalism's enormous class abyss invisible by hastily covering the city's nakedness and crumbling plaster.

But they are wrong. The cheap paint on those buildings' front facades will wash away in the first hard rain and the deep, exploited reality beneath will stand exposed again in all its nakedness. No bourgeois aesthetics can hide that gray, angry, objective reality rising from worker neighborhoods' hearts. Because Ankara's real face is not their painted fake palaces or decorated protocol roads; it is the calloused hands of the plaster worker applying that paint and the "No to NATO!" rage seeping from behind those walls, from cells into streets.

Dehumanizing the City: Deferred Future, Locked Lives

Listen comrade; one of the most insidious methods the bourgeois state uses to please imperialist masters is spatial cleansing—dehumanizing the city entirely. Why would a state dehumanize its own capital, its own squares? The answer is dialectical: Class fear. The ruling class is horrified by the organized anger of enormous popular force that will spill from factories, slums, universities. A crowded city is for them an uncontrollable anomaly, dynamite ready to explode at any moment. That is why to create the cyber-secure, sterile atmosphere of the July 2026 NATO Summit they swept Ankara's people from their own streets; they turned the city into something like a living dead, a gigantic open-air prison.

Spatial Solution to Class Fear: Sterilized Capital

The capitalist state apparatus applies a two-stage "quarantine" concept to isolate the working class from urban space. Streets are purged of the people not only with physical barricades but with administrative and extralegal bullying.

• The People as "Foreign Body": While NATO generals, monopolistic capital chiefs, and collaborationist bureaucrats tour Ankara skies in helicopters and armored convoys; this city's real owners—workers, laborers, students—have been coded as "foreign bodies" (security threats) polluting the city. The city's lifeblood squares like Kızılay, Sakarya, Yüksel Avenue, and Tunalı have been closed to the people, turned into gray corridors where only police and military boot steps echo.

Illusion of Forced Administrative Leave: House Arrests and Invisible Barricades

State bureaucracy presented forced administrative leave given to public personnel and many sectors during summit days as great news. Bourgeois media marketed this as a "summer gift to workers." Yet the naked reality behind this leave is a strategy of spatially imprisoning the masses.

Invisible Shackle: Locking public employees and white-collar workers at home with administrative leave; completely canceling public transport lines, metros, and bus routes is an administrative blow struck at the people's freedom of travel and movement. The state has turned each worker's home into a softened "house arrest" cell. Bourgeoisie afraid to see workers, laborers on the street tries to create a thornless imperialist rose garden by pushing the city's producing hands behind their own walls.

Exam Scythe: Sacrificing Youth's Labor to Killers' Comfort

The most savage, most heartbreaking blow of this dehumanization operation was struck at this homeland's poor, worker children's future, comrade. Two major national exams thousands of young people prepared for months and years with exorbitant cram school costs, expensive books, and hopelessness anxiety, grinding teeth under high inflation—AGS (Academic Personnel and Graduate Education Entrance Exam) and ÖABT (Teaching Field Knowledge Test)—were scythed overnight for NATO.

• Imperialism's Calendar: ÖSYM and government officials brazenly announced postponing these exams to a later date on grounds of "security and logistical coordination must not be disrupted."
• Price of Comfort: The class meaning is this: So blood-stained NATO chiefs' escorted convoys flow smoothly on Ankara avenues, this country's youth's labor, psychology, and future were taken hostage so killers' comfort and security illusion would not be disturbed.

The state mechanism that locks its own youth before school gates and cancels their exams stands at attention before the imperialist war machine's calendar, offering the people's future as appetizer on war barons' table.

Comrade; dehumanizing the city this way, these locked lives and deferred future show us capitalism's ultimate logic. For them humanity is acceptable only as long as it produces surplus value; when imperialist masters' interests are at stake, an entire people is merely "blemishes to be cleaned" in their own city. But they forgot one thing: They cannot destroy anger by emptying streets and postponing exams. The silent anger accumulating in the consciousness of millions of youth and workers they locked at home and whose futures they stole is the real volcano that will demolish all their fake paint and all their barricades!

Conclusion: Saying "No to NATO" Is a Legitimate Right, Bourgeois Politics' Hypocrisy, and Sold "Populism"

Comrade; all we have lived draws once again in the most naked form the disgusting limits of bourgeois law, liberal "democracy" tales, and above all regime politics. Opposing an imperialist massacre network that has turned the world into a sea of blood and dispossessed peoples of the Global South—that is, NATO—is the most natural, objective, and historical right of every honorable person living on these lands. Moreover this right is legally guaranteed in Article 34 of the constitution the bourgeois state wrote with its own hands: "Everyone has the right to organize meetings and demonstration marches without prior permission, unarmed and non-violently."

Yet today in Ankara the state apparatus itself and local government gears have trampled their own laws to look good in foreign generals' eyes. Absolute action bans, fabricated dawn raids, and arrest of lawyers enacted so "No to NATO" would not be said are proof of how law is recklessly sacrificed to imperialism's interests.

Regime Parties' Hypocrisy and the Fall of "Populist" Masks

But do you know what was the real great lesson serving as litmus paper in this process, comrade? The servile, collaborationist attitude of regime parties and their "populist" figures.

Regardless of party and ideological label, Mansur Yavaş's role as Ankara Metropolitan Mayor in this NATO siege—"voluntary obedience to orders"—summarized bourgeois politics' hypocrisy in a single frame.

End of Shop-Window Populism: Those who on election platforms preached "people's money," "public resources," "transparency," and "populism"; the moment chiefs of the imperialist war machine stepped into the city mobilized all municipal means, workers, and budget to polish the roads beneath those killers.

• Silent Complicity: While Ankara people's lives were locked down, while AGS and ÖABT exams determining thousands of poor worker children's futures were canceled and postponed in one stroke—did you hear a single cracked voice, a single criticism from the so-called "people's mayor" Mansur Yavaş? No!
• Becoming Architect of Makeup: On the contrary, it is he who coordinated with municipal hand the cosmetic censorship operation plastering and painting streets to hide the city's real face, poverty, and exploited condition from imperialists' eyes.
• Unity of Capital Blocs: This situation shows us a dialectical truth, comrade: All bourgeois regime parties, in power and opposition, fall in line as a single bloc when it comes to global finance capital, NATO, and imperialist relations of dependence. All their boat-rowing quarrels, fake parliamentary squabbles are cut like a knife; all become loyal servants of imperialism with one mouth.

Final Word: That Plaster Will Not Hold, Ankara Will Not Surrender!

That is why, comrade, exposing the real faces of those who turn regime gears wearing populist masks is our class duty. Their "populism" lasts only until the ballot box, until the masters of the order of exploitation appear at the door.

No fake plaster applied, no hasty asphalt laid, no exam postponed, no arrested comrade thrown behind iron bars can hide this historical decay. Against this collaborationist bourgeois order that is ashamed of its own people, chains them in their own city, and sacrifices their future to killers' comfort—we will surrender neither to power's whip nor to opposition's fake paint.

From courthouse corridors, from university campuses they try to silence, from the heart of organized industry and worker neighborhoods we will continue to shout louder that legitimate, constitutional, unshakeable cry:

NATO Get Out, This Homeland Is Ours!