The TOMA Approach to the Soma Mining Massacre

In his column in the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet on May 17, 2014, Turkish academic and media commentator Emre Kongar used the term “Soma-Toma model” to characterize the political economy of 2014 in Turkey. Soma is the name of the town where a mining accident took place on May 13th, taking the lives of 301 miners[i]. Soma has come to symbolize the very high human costs of hyper-developmentalism and crony capitalism for the working class of Turkey. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), Turkey ranks as the third worst country in the world and the worst in Europe in terms of workplace deaths. Fatal workplace accidents have become so commonplace in Turkey that many union activists and commentators are now preferring to use the term murder instead of “accident”. In the Soma case, the fact that repeated warnings by engineers, technicians, workers at the site and opposition politicians in parliament regarding the risks of production methods, were willfully ignored by the mining firm and the government in the weeks and months preceding the disaster has led some activists and commentators to use the term massacre to refer to the “accident”.