A storied association for the Netherlands’ progressive Turkish community celebrating its anniversary – and worrying about its future
“I was shocked by what I found”, Maviye Karaman says of her arrival in the Netherlands in 1972: “there was absolutely nothing here: no language education, no voting rights, nothing”.
Practised in student organisation and political activism from Turkey, Maviye and her husband Nihat soon became key movers in a new network of progressive organisations dedicated to fighting to improve the poor living conditions of Turkish migrant workers in the Netherlands (an experienced mirrored by that of other migrant communities across Europe at the time).
Nihat became chairman of the HTIB (Hollanda Türkiyeli Isçiler Birligi or Turkish Workers’ Association of the Netherlands), printing pamphlets, advising new migrants of how to overcome Dutch bureaucracy, helping with language training, providing mutual aid. Maviye later helped found the HTKB (Hollanda Türkiye Kadinlar Birligi, or Turkish Women’s Association).
“We were always on the road”, Maviye tells the Dutch newspaper NRC on the fiftieth anniversary of the HTIB: “I don’t know where we found the time, but it gave us energy”.
Half a century later, the organisation’s branches across the Netherlands are a place where old timers drop in for a cup of tea or a beer. An organisation once woven deep into the community, “the HTIB hasn’t been able to build a permanent bridge to the children and grandchildren of these first-generation immigrants”, reports NRC.
After the 1980 military coup in Turkey, the HTIB began raising funds in the Netherlands to support trades’ unions back home. In June 1988, Nihat Karaman was shot dead outside his house, in an attack some have long considered to be politically motivated. In the 2000s, in the wake of 9/11 and the murder of controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh, the HTIB helped bring Dutch politicians and the Turkish community together.
But by then, NRC reports, the international mood had changed in other ways. The USSR had collapsed. Solidarity with workers was out. The HTIB started addressing a new range of issues – domestic violence, homosexuality, honour killings – earning the association’s new chairman both awards in the Netherlands, and threats from Turkey.
Mustafa Ayranci, now in his seventies, considered disbanding the HTIB. The current political situation in the Netherlands has helped him change his mind.
Full original in Dutch by Tan Tunali published under the title ‘Barricade, buurthuis en bruggenbouwer’ on 17 January 2025 and available here.
NRC is a major Dutch newspaper based in Amsterdam.
