Shop owners protest: ‘We don’t want to die or go bankrupt’

* Photo: Dilek Şen - bianet

Click to read the article in Turkish

The business owners in Kadıköy, İstanbul staged a protest yesterday evening (November 23). Underlining that the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) measures adopted in Turkey are not enough, they have raised concers that shop owners are not provided with sufficient support.

The business owners gathered in front of Süreyya Opera House on Bahariye Avenue in Kadıköy district. Stressing that they are not against the measures taken in the country to curb the spread of the coronavirus, they have called on the authorities to make necessary arrangements regarding the economic hardships they have been facing in this process.

Shop owners chanted the slogans, "We don't want to die or go bankrupt" and "Budget for shop owners, not for the palace."

'Time to support the ones who paid their taxes'

Ekin Can Alıcı, the owner of a restaurant in Kadıköy, read out the press statement on behalf of the business owners.

"It has become impossible for the shop owners who paid their taxes for years to survive, they have been pushed to poverty and starvation," the statement read. Alıcı briefly continued as follows:

"The measures to be taken by the state against the spread of the pandemic should be oriented towards not only closing the channels of contact, but also providing the people working and managing these channels of contact with the minimum living standards.

"The taxes, bills, rents and loans to be paid for the period when we do not work have been increasing incrementally.

"Our concern is not about the measures or lockdown decisions taken. Our concern is about the fact that a whole where hundreds of thousands of people are working and hundreds of thousands of families sustain their lives has been condemned to starvation with a fait accompli.

"Not only the rents of shops, but the rents of houses where our workers, who keep their heads above water with wages, must not be demanded, either. Withholding taxes must be cancelled. All taxes to be levied during the pandemic must be written off. The taxes on bills must be abolished.

"Shop owners must be given loans to cover their expenses and these loans must be zero-interest and without payback for a year. A legal arrangement must be made to postpone the payment of cheques.

"The more delayed these measures are taken, the more impossible it will be to dress the wounds. It is time that the ones who paid their taxes to the state were supported by the state. We don't want to die or to go bankrupt."

'Government imposes a class-based quarantine'

Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) İstanbul MP Musa Piroğlu was also in Kadıköy to support the shop owners. Piroğlu briefly said:

"Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the government has been imposing a class-based quarantine. While it has been protecting the rich and monopolies, it has condemned the people to poverty and unemployment and the small business owners to bankruptcy.

"In this second phase of the outbreak, neither do the people have the power to stand this poverty, nor the shop owners have the potential to open their shops! While the government is cutting off the taxes of pro-government [companies] quite generously, it feels free to collect taxes from the business owners who had to close down their shops.

"Those who send workers to work by bus every morning, those who force millions of people to work in factories, those who say that they are fighting the outbreak by closing down businesses are acting hypocritically.

"What needs to be done is quite simple: The state budget spent for war and pro-government circles must be allocated for people's health. The expenses of shop owners and workers must be covered and a struggle must be waged against the outbreak with really scientific methods.

"In a country where the economic crisis is deepening on the one side and unemployment has reached record-high levels on the other, these policies will only lead to devastation; it needs to be known that no one will stay silent in the face of this." (DŞ/EKN/SD)