On the 7th Anniversary of Garbis's Death
On this death anniversary, instead of repeating what is known and writing the same things, I needed to tell the little-known and unknown things about Garbis.
He came from a large family deeply rooted in the soil of Amasya. In 1915, they were both cut down and uprooted. To prevent clover from ever growing green again in a clover field, they pull the clover up together with its roots. Like many Armenians in Amasya, Garbis’s family had been uprooted and cut down like clover.
His father was 6 years old during the 1915 genocide. His aunt, several years older than his father, was taken under the protection of an Ottoman officer of Albanian origin named Recep Prizrenli, and in this way the two siblings were saved from the massacre. The name of his aunt, Agavni, was changed to Mesude. She was one of thousands of examples of Turkification and Islamization. This officer “saved” Agavni, the elder sister of Ohannes (Garbis’s father), for the purpose of marrying her, and married her. He also took her younger brother Ohannes with him. Of the six siblings in Garbis’s mother’s family, only one remained. All her siblings had been slaughtered before her eyes. That one person, because they were millers, had been left alive in order to run the mill.
The family surname changed from Altunyan to Altınoğlu as a result of the compulsory Turkification under the surname law issued in 1934.
When Garbis was born in 1946, his parents and a few people from the older generation were left. His father, Ohannes, was a working man, a shoe repairer. His mother, Maryam, was a small-scale seamstress in her own right. They were poor but at peace. Garbis stayed with his family until he finished primary school and began boarding school at Tıbrevank in Istanbul, where poor and orphaned Armenian children were educated. In the years after that, including at Boğaziçi, where he studied on a scholarship and as a boarder, as well as his illegal life and prison captivity, he always lived apart from his family for more than half of his entire life.
He completed his middle- and high-school education at the clerical school of the Armenian minority. But Garbis chose not the priesthood but the Communist Manifesto. Starting from his high-school years, in the mid-1960s, when anti-imperialist winds were blowing across the world, he became a revolutionary. Worldwide, in Asian, African, and Latin American countries, national liberation and people’s revolutions were taking place one after another, along with student movements, workers’ strikes, and resistance. In our country too, these were years when student actions, protests, workers’ strikes, and resistance were rising. The anti-imperialist actions of the ’68 revolutionary generation, workers’ strikes, and resistance were setting the country’s agenda. Garbis participated, on the one hand, in the anti-imperialist actions of student youth, and on the other in the strike, resistance, and rights struggles of workers and laborers.
About a month after the March 12, 1972 fascist coup, on April 10, 1972, he was captured in Kayseri and placed in the Mamak Military Prison in Ankara. At that time, he remained in prison for two and a half years. While he was in prison, his father died. In 1974, he was released from prison under the Ecevit amnesty. On the one hand, he completed his interrupted university education. On the other hand, he continued his political activities.
On May 1, 1977, the “bloody Taksim massacre” took place. The state’s deep extensions, which organized this massacre days in advance, had plotted it together with MİT, counter-guerrilla units, and the CIA. The state and bourgeois media wanted to make Garbis the scapegoat in this massacre. The state, left completely exposed as the planner and perpetrator of the May 1 massacre in Taksim Square in 1977, wanted both to be acquitted of the massacre crime and to pin that crime on Garbis, an Armenian revolutionary. On TRT Radio (there was no TV at that time), a news report was broadcast at the main news hour that sought to portray Garbis as a murderer and an enemy of the people. The next day, the Hürriyet newspaper, then called the flagship, ran a front-page lead story with large colored type and Garbis’s photograph under the headline “Garbis Altınoğlu committed the massacre.” By targeting Garbis, anti-Armenian hostility and hatred were once again being stirred up as state policy through his person. (Just as the same lies would be served up a year later in the 1978 Maraş Massacre.) On May 1, 1977, Garbis was conducting illegal struggle in the Antep-Malatya-Maraş region. He was not even in Istanbul, let alone in Taksim May 1 Square. The newspaper printed and distributed in Istanbul was intercepted by his comrades on the morning after the massacre, before it was released for distribution in Anatolia. In the early morning hours, they seized the newspaper’s entire print run before it reached distribution points and completely destroyed it. This seizure action took place thanks to the vigilance of comrades operating in the same region as Garbis at that time.
Garbis remained in the illegal struggle until he was captured in an operation against the organization in Istanbul on December 31, 1981. I do not need to recount the tortures he suffered; the revolutionary public knows enough. After March 12 fascism, in the prisons where he served ten years for the second time, for about seven years he was held in isolation in exile, cells, and sections called observation, accompanied by special practices.
As a result of the court in which he was tried for being an organization administrator, he was sentenced to death, the highest penalty. He held a managerial position in middle-level bodies. But he was not the leader of the organization. In the court he was brought before, he made a very harsh political defense that left all the state’s institutions completely exposed. His being both Armenian and communist led to his being sentenced to death as the maximum penalty.
With the new sentence-execution law issued in 1989, death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Under the sentence-reduction law applied to all political prisoners, his sentence was reduced to 20 years. Since he had served 10 years, he was released on December 31, 1991. The ruling classes and judicial institutions of the period could not stomach Garbis’s release. Shortly after his release, he again became the object of an intense manhunt. The circle around him had narrowed considerably.
In the winter months of 1993, the organization got him out of the country.
His work abroad was, in one respect, behind the front lines. On the other hand, the importance of internationalist relations with fraternal communist and revolutionary parties in the international arena was increasing even more.
In 1995, during the merger of three communist organizations in the country (at least their programs were M-L), although Garbis was in the minority on many fundamental issues, he strove with all his might, both theoretically and practically, toward unification. He saw the merger of the three organizations as an important step in the growth of Turkey’s revolutionary and communist movement. In the summer of 1995, the Unity Congress was held in the country. Despite the risk of capture, including to his personal safety, Garbis went from abroad and took part in the Congress. At the Congress, the merger that had been discussed for months took place. The organization’s name became MLKP-Kuruluş and later MLKP.
Garbis played a major role in the international recognition of the organization’s program and goals among communist and revolutionary organizations. Through the joint initiative of some revolutionary and fraternal communist organizations, including the MLKP, in July 1997, the International Committee of the Disappeared in Detention (ICAD) was founded in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. The organization also participated in this formation at the delegate level. Garbis argued that in international work it was necessary to learn from the struggles, actions, and forms of other countries. Therefore, the idea of the Saturday Mothers Action in Turkey, which took as its example the Plaza de Mayo Mothers action in Argentina that resonated greatly worldwide, belonged to Garbis. (No one knows this; although I was a witness to his close work, I would learn this only much later.)
The MLKP, which regarded itself as Marxist-Leninist and Communist, began to rapidly evolve shortly after its founding toward the line of Kurdish nationalism that it brought to its peak in 1997–98. It surrendered to the agenda of the Kurdish national movement. As if it had no program and goals of its own, it cast aside Marxist-Leninist principles and perspective. It was dragged into a position more Kurdish-nationalist than the Kurdish national movement. This situation became the beginning of a parting of ways between Garbis and the organization. In the last two years before the split, he experienced the most intense period of his long-standing intra-organizational ideological and political struggle. During this period, he waged a long, very heavy, and painful ideological struggle, but he was not heeded. Neither what he said nor what he wrote was taken into account. He was isolated within the organization. He experienced open censorship and covert isolation.
At the end of this painful and aching process, in the summer months of 2000, he definitively parted ways. Even if he remained alone, he could not compromise on his M-L stance. Being organized, being together with the collective, was not an end but only a means on the road to Revolution and Socialism. The organization could not be an end.
He struggled against approaches contrary to Marxism-Leninism on many fundamental issues. He strove to cleanse the organization of all kinds of revisionist opportunist approaches. For many long years he conducted these differences within organizational discipline. He waged the ideological struggle over this only in the bodies to which he was attached. However, the organization’s stance on the Kurdish question became one of the decisive issues that led him to part ways.
In the summer months of 2000, he definitively parted ways. As an independent communist, in those years too he did not fit into any organization or circle; he could not fit; he did not take refuge; he did not feel the need to take refuge. In his M-L stance and struggle, he continued his independent march until his death. In the last 20 years of his life, he worked alone with organizational discipline. He left lasting, serious fundamental works and articles that he had been unable to produce when he was organized in the past.
“If I had a belief in God, I would say Marxism is my destiny,” he used to say. He lived this “destiny” honorably and resolutely.
He was an Armenian. He did not imprison himself within the trauma of his ancestors and his community. He fraternized and integrated the historical pain experienced by his people with the pains of other peoples. Nor did he compromise his principles and stance before the Kurdish nationalism that says, “We suffered greatly; there is no people that suffered more than us.”
He was an internationalist. He exposed and condemned, down to the finest details, the oppression and repression the state applied to the Kurdish people. The articles he wrote in this area were a complete portrait of the Turkish state. He displayed the best example of solidarity with the oppressed Kurdish people. However, against both oppressor-nation and oppressed-nation nationalism, the banner he carried was Marxism-Leninism.
Throughout his life, he defended and applied the slogan “Workers and Oppressed Peoples of All Countries, Unite!” This slogan was also engraved on his gravestone.
14 October 2026 —
Written by the surviving wife, Yıldız Aydın
