On May 11, Istanbul’s newly renovated Atatürk Cultural Center hosted the first World Decolonization Forum. The event was organized by a coalition of Turkish institutions such as the NÛN Foundation for Education and Culture and the Institute of Social Studies, alongside international partners including Shanghai University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Turkish organizers shared a common denominator that was not difficult to trace: direct ownership ties to former Finance Minister Berat Albayrak and his wife, Esra Erdoğan Albayrak, the President’s daughter.
The venue was a statement by itself. The Atatürk Cultural Center sits in the shadow of the Taksim Mosque, a project that conservative leaders had coveted for decades and that Erdoğan finally completed. Likewise, the forum was designed to serve as the intellectual architecture for Erdoğan’s long-standing geopolitical positioning, which is that Turkey is not merely a critic of the Western-dominated global order, but the pioneer in constructing its alternative.
The state-run Anadolu Agency has captured this in a phrase that functions almost as a national motto: “The world is bigger than five” (a reference to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council). It was also a declaration of something more domestic. Turkey’s conservatives have spent decades arguing that cultural power, kültürel iktidar, remained in the hands of the secularist, Kemalist establishment. This forum was, among other things, a staging ground for the claim that this had finally changed.
It was Esra Erdoğan Albayrak who opened the proceedings. Her speech was long and polished, moving briskly through anti-colonial frameworks and contemporary crises such as the genocidal rhetoric of Israeli politicians, the legacy of imperialist extraction from the Global South, and a passing reference to Epstein Island that landed somewhere between geopolitical critique and a tabloid register.
One moment stood out for different reasons. Albayrak argued that decolonization required freeing the white man as well, framing colonizers as co-victims of the burden history had placed on them. It is a proposition that Frantz Fanon spent his life arguing against. Amilcar Cabral argued against it. The entire tradition whose vocabulary this forum was borrowing argued against it. The speech did not appear to register this tension.
To fill the hall, organizers had bused in local high school students. The teenagers spent the session chatting, scrolling, and making the ordinary noise of people who have been asked to sit somewhere unfamiliar for reasons that were never explained to them. When the speech ended, they rose and left in a wave, and the auditorium behind them was visibly, suddenly empty.
As a Kurdish academic based in Istanbul, I was in the room. I have attended enough forums of this kind to recognize the architecture of managed legitimacy that this forum also demonstrated, from the careful curation of speakers to the event workers stationed at every door to prevent people from entering with drinks, deployed in numbers that suggested something more than hospitality protocol. What I had not anticipated was what happened when Mireille Fanon Mendès-France took the stage.
Fanon is a legal scholar and former expert at the UN Working Group on People of African Descent. She is also the daughter of Frantz Fanon, and she carries that lineage with both weight and precision. She has spoken publicly about how her father remains effectively blacklisted in France. She filed a complaint at the International Court of Justice on behalf of victims of the 2008–2009 Gaza War. Her anti-colonial credentials are not ornamental, which the organizers knew when they invited her.
She spoke in French. I listened to the English simultaneous translation, skeptical of how the Turkish interpreters would handle something sensitive. For most of her address, the room was with her. She focused on contemporary issues like the US administration’s support for Israel, the ongoing situation in Iran and Lebanon, and the need for a genuinely global anti-colonial solidarity. The applause was frequent and warm.
Then she said, calmly, that true decolonization requires introspection, and that Turkey would also need to be self-critical about its ongoing treatment of the Kurdish population, viewed through the same colonial framework the forum was applying everywhere else.
The silence that followed was not the silence of consideration. It was the silence of a room recalibrating. She finished her remarks and sat down. The atmosphere did not recover.
During the Q&A, a young francophone man was invited – not called on but invited – to the stage. Other participants had to raise their hands or pass a roaming microphone. He was brought up twice. He read from a prepared text, word by careful word. The text was dense with hyper-local Turkish political references, including names, events, and contexts that no visiting international scholar could be expected to know. The goal was not clarification; it was designed to overwhelm, to reframe Fanon as an outsider who had spoken beyond her knowledge. When he finished, the applause was immediate and loud. It was not the applause that follows an argument but rather that follows a verdict.
I was one of the few people who approached Fanon after the panel. I told her that as a Kurd, I was grateful she had said what she said, in that room, in Istanbul. She told me she was not surprised by the reaction. She said she had felt she simply had to do what was right.
Standing there, I found myself telling her about something I had attended three weeks earlier, a few miles away.
On April 24, I had joined members of the Armenian community in Şişli for a commemoration of the 1915 genocide. The gathering was small. The police presence was not. We were outnumbered roughly three to one by riot officers carrying weapons designed for crowd suppression, stationed at blockades that prevented ordinary passersby from crossing the street to join the mourners. It was the kind of security that does not protect an event but contains it. The memory that kept returning to me was of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist shot dead on an Istanbul street in 2007, whose teenage killer was later photographed with police officers who treated him as a celebrity rather than a suspect.
I did not say all of this to Fanon. But it stayed with me, and it stays with me still. The distance between those two scenes, the commemoration ringed by riot police in April, the decolonization forum in May, is less than twenty days and a few kilometers. The state that deployed those officers at Şişli was the same state that had flown in scholars from around the world to discuss the perspective of the oppressed and the need for historical reparations.
The proof, if any was still needed, arrived shortly after the forum ended. Turkey’s Minister of National Education announced a curriculum revision. The phrase “the Armenian issue”, already a bureaucratic minimization, will be replaced in school textbooks by a mandatory unit titled Asılsız Ermeni İddiaları, or “Unfounded Armenian Allegations.” The Ottoman policy that drove the deportations will no longer be referred to as the Relocation Law. It will be called the Resettlement Law.
This is the context in which the World Decolonization Forum was held. It is also the context in which the applause for that scripted rebuttal of Mireille Fanon makes a different kind of sense. Decolonization, in this framing, is a posture directed outward via critiques of Western power structures, UN architecture, and settler colonialism in Gaza. But it is not a mirror. The moment it becomes one, the applause stops, and the stage managers move in.
For those of us watching from within these spaces, the lesson is not new, but it is becoming more urgent. The right now hosts decolonization conferences. The vocabulary of the left has been captured.
The vocabulary of liberation is durable and transferable. It can be borrowed by any state willing to invest in the right speakers and the right lighting. What it cannot survive, for long, is the presence of someone who insists on pointing the analysis in both directions at once.
That is what Fanon did. That is why she was sitting almost alone when the room emptied. The global southern intellectual and activist should be willing to stay alone and be singled out to protect the liberation vocabulary from right-wing politicians.
Azad Welat is a scholar based in Turkey.
This article first appeared in The Amargi and is republished here with permission.
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