We have previously written about Kemal Seyfullah, author of the only monograph on Ferit Bayram, in an earlier post. Here, we present a short study on traces from the life of Seyfullah himself and about the small but very effective communist organisation of which he was a leading member. The Muslim Communist Cell was founded in Skopje in 1941 by directive of the Yugoslav Communist Party, following a mass uprising against the fascist occupation of Macedonia. Seyfullah details this organisation in a text that was collected in the second volume of the massive six-volume history of the formation of Yugoslav Partisan struggle, a project directed by the Surrealist poet, Koca Popović (Ustanak Naroda Jugoslavije/Uprising of Yugoslav People, 1964, Belgrade). The cell was formed in the house of Mustafa Karahasan, by Karahasan together with Hamdi Demir, Abdus Huseyin, Seyfullah, and other Turkish and Albanian speaking internationalists active in the youth section of the Communist party (SKOJ, League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia).
In his text, Seyfullah describes one of their first actions as a group, which was the building of an illegal printing press for the reproduction of leaflets and pamphlets. In the terminology of the activists, this was referred to as setting up the “technique” or “device”. The action consisted of securing a location for the Gestetner (a duplicating machine), mounting it, translating leaflets, reproducing them, dismantling the Gestetner once more, and hiding it in parts. The Gestetner was a stencil-method duplicator that used a thin sheet of paper coated with wax; at the beginning of the forties, it was considered amongst the most dangerous of devices, and every communist worth his salt had to know how to operate it. To prevent discovery, the heavy device often had to be unmounted and remounted in a new place; a task which similarly implied an amount of risk due to its bulk. Seyfullah recounts a formidable story about hiding pieces of the Gestetner under the tomb of the Yesil Baba mausoleum; a place surely no one would think to look. Due to the solidarity expressed by local dervishes, the communists’ printing device was hidden in some of the most sacred spaces for the Muslim population in Skopje. In 1942, after he had joined the Partisans, Seyfullah came secretly to Skopje — as the only one who knew the whereabouts — to collect the letters and parts from under the Yesil Baba tomb, from which a new printing press was constructed in the woods.
The initial activities of Seyfullah and the others, were performed under the umbrella of the legal organisation “Yardım” (Help), a youth-led humanist organisation with leftist leanings, which was especially engaged in encouraging the development of a workers’ culture through theatres, free libraries, and sport. In a roundtable discussion with the original members of the Muslim Cell, organised by the Birlik and Flaka e Vllaznimit newspapers in 1959, one can read more about these activities, including their translations of Nazim Hikmet (into Albanian and into the spoken Turkish of those living in Skopje), popular comedies directed against corrupt Muslim bureaucrats, sports competitions, and numerous camps (kir gezintisi) in the nature. The Turkish transcript of this conversation was made by Şükrü Ramo and can be read under the title ‘Üsküp Müslüman Parti Birliği/Skopje Muslim Party Unity’, in Birlik, 15 July 1959.
The objective for forming the Muslim Cell was not based on the politics of identity, as Seyfullah and Karahasan emphasise in the aforementioned discussion; they never felt like an “ethnic” addition to the pan-Yugoslav anti-fascist and internationalist uprising. They were an equal part of the international movement. They aimed to mobilise Albanian and Turkish speaking populations against oppressive structures in Macedonia and Kosovo, including those of Serbian colonisers, Bulgarian occupations, encroaching Italian and German fascists, and the local feudal collaborators. It was a tiny cell, initially with just eleven members, all organically connected in what Antonio Gramsci would have called a “molecule”; or, the first molecule of a new form, a new organisation. That was the role of the Muslim Cell, a catalyst for broader change. And, when the right time approached they disbanded by joining other Partisan guerilla units and moving deeper underground.
The “cell” was Kemal Seyfullah’s platform; his individual trajectory is evidence of the expansion of this molecule to a new form of socialist hegemony. Seyfullah, twice wounded and imprisoned during the war, became a high-ranking Partisan by the end of the Second World War, the Mayor of Skopje from 1951 to 1954, a member of the Central Committee, the Yugoslavian ambassador to Zambia and Botswana, and a board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje in the sixties. He was an avid collector of contemporary art, an internationally active communist, translator, writer, and the biography of Seyfullah is yet to be written. The only document available today about Seyfullah is a small extract from Füruzan’s Balkan reportage in which she interviews Kemal’s brother, Lütfü Seyfullah. Lütfü tells her about the adventures of his brother, Tito’s attachment to him, visiting him in Zambia, his purchase of a Picasso for the Museum of Contemporary Art, his support for Milovan Djilas, a temporary dissent from communist institutions, his theoretical writings and anti-bureaucratic life, his distaste for nationalism, and so forth. Lütfü concludes the interview by remarking that it was “good [Kemal] didn’t [live to see] these days” (Füruzan, Balkan Yolcusu, Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 1996).
Both Lütfü’s recollections, and Füruzan’s commentary have to be taken with a pinch of salt. What can be recommended though, are the writings of Kemal Seyfullah himself, which mostly deal with questions of nation. A collection of his writings on nationalism was published in 1972 as Ulusallık Sorunu (The National Question, Sesler, Skopje, 1972); they offer a conceptual framework for the discussion of nationalism in relation to international politics, and most importantly, develop from perspectives of class, gender, and cultural emancipation. The chapters — each published as separate essays in the journal Sesler — address this theory from several angles: ‘The National Question Today’ (originally published in the first issue of Sesler in 1965), is the opening text, and sets the terms of discussion with the national question as a contemporary problematic, and thus a problematic within socialism, ‘The Economic Relation between Nations and Nationalities’, ‘International Relations and the Question of Culture’, ‘Lenin on the National Question’, etc. Seyfullah also wrote more technical reports on the national question, including the ‘Yugoslav Communist League and National Minorities’ (Savez Komunista Jugoslavije i Nacionalno Pitanje, Kultura, Belgrade, 1959); and ‘The National Minorities in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia’, translated into both English and French (‘Jugoslavia’, Belgrade, 1965).
These books, reports, and analyses became the core theoretical and institutional documents forming the Turkish speaking national ideologies during socialism in Yugoslavia. In following months we will critically engage with these materials, and propose a new narrative for the complexities of Turkish and other national formations in Kosovo and Macedonia during the socialist period.