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Istanbul Alternative Declaration
Contact: Ozguc Orhan
email: orhano@boun.edu.tr
INTRODUCTION
Our world is at crossroads and it cannot be claimed that we have much time to take some critical decisions. All the human family feels the necessity of cooperation more than ever. The UN, established right after the World War II, its side institutions and the UN Summits whose latest one was organized in Istanbul were all raised from the necessity or even the urgency of this cooperation.
The ecological destruction and the accompanying social destruction, recently have reached the great scales which require urgent measures at the local and global levels. However, unfortunately, the methods applied for both the diagnosis of the problems and the proposed solution techniques are deficient in pointing to an outlet. One of the most important reasons for this is the powerlessness of the dominant nation- state model and UN(without democratization) which contains deficiencies of this nation-state model in face of the urgency of the situation.
With each passing day the crisis that humanity faces, becomes more and more complex. The solution of the crisis lies in the transcendence of the ineffective methods and those structures that insist on these methods. All humanity needs a thorough change at the local and global scales with its social, cultural, psychological, economic and political dimensions. The impediments for this change are the power, money and prestige fanatics holding the critical positions in existing nation- state model. The change can be realized only by surpassing these structures through a permanent and an effective dissident struggle.
The foremost point in this struggle to be taken into consideration by those pro-change forces ought to be the efforts of those people wishing to perpetuate their interests in the existing order by superficial reforms and co-opting the opposition. The most apparent of these efforts during Habitat Summit, which seem good-intentioned from the outside but in fact arise from the helplessness and craftiness, has been the non- functional cooperation of the official structures with the civil societal forces. The participation of NGOs in Habitat Summit should be viewed from this perspective.
WHY ALTERNATIVE?
However the intentions are good, there needs to be always balancing forces in places where there are power relations. The anti-democratic structure of UN and the human rights violations of Turkey, the host country for the Human Settlements Conference, still continue. Alternative Habitat Platform has been organized for exposing these two realities.
CIVIL SOCIETY & STATE
Some NGOs has claimed that it is necessary to confront the state in the political arena to force it to relinquish the unwarranted powers to the civil societal forces. By confining the state within its basic functional area, it would be possible to prevent the state to encroach upon the civil society and in turn render the it more effective and positive. We appreciate their efforts as long as they are dedicated to this cause.
The wary designation of the space, time and conditions of the struggle with such an organized and even ruthless institution like state is vitally important for the development of a healthy civil society. The determination of all these dynamics by the state means that the opposition is under control thus the aimed change will not be able to be brought about.
For us, the pacifist sit-ins organized for over fifty weeks by the families whose relatives have been missing under the custody, and attacked fiercely by the police during Habitat give the clues of an exact civil movement. These actions whose space, time and conditions have been determined by ordinary people and supported by several sectors of the society, have been successful in the sense that they have challenged the legitimacy of the repressive system. The police state which was disturbed by this success, has resorted to the use of violence.
We believe that understanding the procedure used by the (Turkish) state to co-opt the civic opposition is critical to engage in further civil society-state discussions:
- Primarily the legal procedures and regulations are in such a form that make it difficult for the civic initiatives to organize with free will and to stay alive.
- Deprived of the financial and legal support, some civic groups decide to cooperate with the state which make them controlled by the state.
- The state reflects those collaborating groups to the general public opinion as the sole legitimate representatives of the civil society and ignores the other radical groups which could offer alternative ideas. For this purpose we witness the collaboration of the media and the state whose existence are interlinked.
- Denied a voice in the media, these civic groups continue their struggle with limited opportunities; then the state together with its civil collaborators begin to project them as social misfits. If this doesn't work then the state resorts to direct police violence and repression.
- Those groups kept under constant police repression, begin to lose hope of the effectiveness of struggle within the legal system. When they respond violently to the state violence then the state again with the help of the media projects these groups to the public opinion as the sole representatives of the radical opposition.
- The other radical groups struggling with peaceful means are thus denied of the appealing to public consciousness as a result of this censorship.
Despite the limited opposition that the NGO Forum in Habitat Summit allowed, it would be over-optimistic to claim that it has provided or will provide more than just the get-together of the people from various parts of the world. We believe the necessity of such get-togethers for a permanent struggle but we also see that the UN Summits have begun to repeat themselves without producing effective results. It is an obvious reality that the official representatives participating in these summits live through an amnesia when they turn back to their countries.
It will be a waste of time to organize new summits without discussing the reasons for this ineffectiveness. It is imperative to transform the UN's existing bureaucratical, hierarchical and anti-democratic structure into a more democratic one to enable the effective implementation of decisions. So we believe that it is necessary to support the efforts for democratizing the UN system. Alternative organizations taking a stand outside the UN Summits and intending to disclose the plots behind the closed doors will contribute to this democratization process.
During such summits some good-intentioned initiatives overlook some realities due the heat and excitement of their struggle. Let us explain what we mean with an example: The significance of Habitat Summit for the Turkish state is nothing more than the foreign exchanges