As Hüsamettin Cindoruk and Yalçın Küçük passed away within days of each other, this is an attempt to sketch their portraits in a single piece.
They were close in age.
While they may have moved in different political lanes, they still shared firsthand experience of more than sixty years of this country’s political life.
A LAWYER IN THE TRIAL THAT EXECUTED A PRIME MINISTER
Hüsamettin Cindoruk was only 27, a young lawyer at the Yassıada trials. There, he was defending Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, who would later be executed together with two of his ministers. Then came the Justice Party (AP), heir to Menderes’ political legacy. Its new leader — and thus the new master of the center-right — was Süleyman Demirel.
Cindoruk stood with Demirel. The 1970s followed. The socialist left was becoming a serious mass movement. Demirel and Cindoruk were firmly men of the right. Then came the military coup of Sept. 12, 1980. Demirel and Cindoruk were imprisoned in Zincirbozan and banned from politics. When coup leader Kenan Evren became president and allowed elections, they wanted to return as the center-right. All the more so because one of their own former bureaucrats, Turgut Özal, had become prime minister. Demirel, in response, took to the road again, declaring, “I will not let a shantyhouse be built on land I own.”
In the 1991 elections, his party, the DYP, emerged as the leading force at the ballot box and formed a coalition government with the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP), then led by the son of Turkey’s second president, İsmet İnönü. And at that moment — before the country had shifted to the “Turkish-style presidential system” — who was the speaker of parliament, the holder of what was then seen as the “second seat” of the state? You guessed it: Hüsamettin Cindoruk.
WHO WAS HOW MUCH OF A DEMOCRAT
The two grand bosses of the center-right were now occupying the first and second seats of the republic. When Özal died in office as president, Demirel moved up to replace him. The ruling party was then forced to choose a new leader. Much as they resisted — and they struggled mightily against it — they could not prevent the rise of Tansu Çiller, a blonde academic woman, to the top of a party dominated by older men. Then on March 2, 1994, the parliamentary immunity of Kurdish deputies of that era was lifted.
As speaker of parliament, Cindoruk tried, as far as he could, to prevent their detention. But only to a point. Of course, once they left parliament, the police took them all in.
As Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismantled the center-right and consolidated one-man rule, Cindoruk, growing older, gradually withdrew to the sidelines. Yet with no real center-right remaining, he found himself on increasingly closer terms with the CHP.
YALÇIN KÜÇÜK’S STRUGGLE
Yalçın Küçük was an economist and a socialist. Not of today’s sort, but a member of the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) of the 1960s and 1970s. His path may well have crossed with Cindoruk’s — there is no record of it, but one can imagine that what befell them was, in some ways, alike.
Yalçın Küçük’s true rise came after the 1980 coup. His output was astonishing. Theses on the Intellectual and Theses on Turkey were written more than half a century ago, yet they remain texts worth reading today. Küçük was an intellectual, a dissenter, a writer who knew neither obedience nor submission.
Did he have flaws and mistakes? Of course he did.
For instance, he walked alongside the Eurasianist Doğu Perinçek. At the ODA TV and Ergenekon trials, too, Professor Yalçın stood at the very front. He would also go and speak with Abdullah Öcalan. But it is hard to find another figure who criticized so directly, so unsparingly, the left and socialist world to which he himself belonged. We will also remember him in his red scarf, from Ankara’s Karakusunlar Village — once known as the “100th Year Workers’ Blocks,” built in the centennial year of Atatürk’s birth.
