The Story of a transition: the organization and the reception of the Bergama movement

Abstract

This study scrutinizes the way of organization, the demands, the conflicts and the dynamics of the Bergama Peasant Movement which started fifteen years ago and has been amortizing after 2003. Not the movement itself, but "how the movement was reflected and perceived by the other groups" is the basic subject of this study. Considering the economic, political and juridical agenda of Turkey, how the popular media interpreted the movement and the transformation in the reflections of the media about the movement and its implications will be analyzed. Bergama Peasant Movement - thought to have a social basis - inspired and guided following environment and peasant movements methodologically. However, the popular media articulate the movement different development discourses according to the agenda of Turkey. The press first confirmed and attempted to articulate the movement with modernization and democratic development discourse in Turkey. But then, popular media initiated to criminalize the movement since it was believed that the movement hindered economic development. The mass media both gave place to and reflected the movement according to both the socio-economic conditions and the reactions of the actors to these conditions. Yet, it reduced the movement to only an environmentalist one and tried to articulate this struggle to the politics of democratic development and then sustainable economic development, thus ignored the villagers̕ struggles for their basic rights such as right to live and protection of habitation. This study is thought to underline a period of economic, political, and juridical tensions in Turkey.