In memory of Halil Celik (1961–2018)
By
the International Committee of the Fourth International
2 January 2019
Halil Celik, the founder and leader of the Sosyalist Eşitlik group, which supports the International Committee of the Fourth International in Turkey, died on December 31, 2018 after a serious illness at the age of 57. The following message was sent by the ICFI to the funeral of the unrelenting revolutionary and fighter for Trotskyism, which took place in Istanbul on Tuesday.
To the family of Halil Celik and his comrades in Sosyalist Eşitlik:
With profound respect, and a sense of deep loss, I extend to you the condolences of the International Committee of the Fourth International on the death of Comrade Halil Celik.
Halil was, personally and politically, an extraordinary person. In late 1977, at the age of 16, he engaged in socialist activity and remained a revolutionary fighter to the end of his life. The political course he pursued required political vision, personal courage and inexhaustible energy.
Rapidly breaking with the Stalinist milieu, where he began his political activities, Halil developed an intense interest in Trotskyism. In the early 1980s, while still a young man in his twenties, he studied Trotsky’s Struggle against Fascism in Germany. “I started to re-read Marx, Engels and Lenin, and recognized that Stalin was the enemy of Marxism,” he later wrote.
But in a country, where Trotsky’s writings were difficult to find, and the political left was dominated by myriad nationalist and petty-bourgeois tendencies, the path to genuine Marxist internationalism turned out to be a long and arduous one. But Halil was a genuine fighter, determined to establish a revolutionary movement of the working class. He could not be…