After an intense weekend of protests and violent police retaliation in Gezi Park and throughout the country, there is little evidence that life will simply return to normal in Turkey.
The conflict arose over the government’s plan to demolish Gezi Park, one of the few green spaces left in Istanbul, in order to construct Ottoman Era style barracks that would house a shopping mall. Disturbed citizens set up camp in the park earlier this week, trying to prevent trees from being cut down and halt the demolition process. On Friday, the police attempted to evict the protesters by force using high power water hoses, tear gas, and pepper spray and eventually setting their tents on fire. The government’s extreme response upset Turks throughout the country, inspiring further protest in Istanbul, Ankara and beyond.
From Friday to Saturday, we saw a shift in the goals of the protestors. No longer was this an issue of a public park being destroyed, it was an expression of disappointment and outrage towards a government which has become increasingly authoritarian in the past decade. The Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party), or AKP, which now dominates the Turkish government with the most parliamentary seats, first gained power in 2002. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and the party have been criticized for breaking Turkey’s foundation of a secular state. It appears to some that conservative
Islamic values have been the driving force behind many of the government’s changes. On May 24th, an anti-alcohol bill was passed prohibiting the sale of alcohol between 10: 00 PM and 6:00 AM, within a hundred yards of a mosque or school, and alcohol producers are not longer permitted to sponsor public events. Erdogan’s government has also notoriously suppressed free speech. According to the Journalists Union of Turkey , 94 journalists were in jail as of March of 2012 and a total of 700 reporters were arrested between 2007 and 2012. (This may account for the utter lack of reporting from Turkish radio, print, and televised news sources on the events of the past few days. Social media and word of mouth has worked to spread the word of the protests worldwide).
With dis-contentedness already brewing below the surface, the government’s explosive response to peaceful protesters is being described as the straw that broke the camel’s back. A full on demonstration of the people’s power is being staged now to illuminate the strength and will of the citizens of Turkey. In Ankara, the country’s capital, people have been protesting outside of Erdogan’s offices. On Saturday, it is reported that 40, 000 Turks crossed the Bosphorus Bridge from the Asian side of the country to the European side in order to protest in the Beşiktaş region. At the same time, public transportation was shut down in order to prevent people form getting to Taksim square and feeding the volume of the already massive protest. According to BBC, interior minister Muammer Guler says protests in 67 cities has led to the arrest of 1700 Turks. The severity of the response of the police has yet to simmer down: helicopters were dropping tear gas bombs on protestors Saturday, powerful hoses were being used at close range to knock down protestors, and images of police officers with devices full of pepper spray can be found directly spraying the liquid into the eyes of demonstrators.
Credit: CNN
The protests have made their way all the way to our fine city of New York. Zuccotti Park, the now famous site of the Occupy Wall Street protests, has been home to the #OccupyGeziNewYork movement this weekend. Exclusive footage from Saturday’s gathering can be found below.
On Saturday, Erdogan addressed the public through a televised press conference in which he insisted that the demolition and construction of Gezi Park would continue. He reportedly called his police department’s initial retaliation a “bit” severe, and thus has promised to launch an investigation exploring their response.
Turkey’s protests should not be splattered onto the world scene as the next in the series of uprisings in the Middle East, according to Muftah at least. This website established in 2010 whose mission is to “provide incisive analysis on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) that eschewed Western obsessions with terrorism, oil, and Islamism and, instead, highlighted issues and concerns that mattered to the region’s people” by “fostering free and open debate about regional issues by featuring articles from diverse (sometimes conflicting) perspectives and working with a large and eclectic group of writers that include academics, practitioners, activists, and members of the MENA diasporas,” claims “young people from the country’s mainly upper-class, secular ‘white Turk’ social strata are the key driving force… in this sense, these demonstrations represent one of the last convulsions of the old ‘secular’ elites, who have been waging, and losing, a bitter battle against the rising Anatolian nouveau-riche that make up Erdogan’s AKP.”
The protesters, on the other hand, convey a sense of unity defying socio-economic boundaries present in these demonstrations. An Indigogo campaign was recently launched to raise $53,800 to buy a full page ad in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal in order to accurately spread the message worldwide of what is happening in Turkey. Their call to action states, “the demonstrators are from different ideological, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. They are young, old, religious, secular, gay, straight, foreign, domestic, fringe, anarchist, mainstream, women in headscarves, women in tanktops, Alevi, Sunni, Jewish, and Christian. They are not provocateurs or foreign agents, save a few. This is the fledgling Turkish Democracy in action.”
Personally, I have to believe that the type of boundary defying unity described above must be attracting Turkish protesters from all walks of life. As we have seen through social media outlets and the reports from foreign and American correspondents coming out of Turkey, the nation appears to be rising together to make necessary change in their government now stagnant in its AKP dominance for over a decade. After being sent a photo of my own cousin, born and raised in Istanbul, returning from Taksim square with bloodshot eyes from being pepper sprayed, and then texted the video above from my Istanbul native father protesting in Zucotti Park, I can only feel a sense of great pride for my family and other Turks fighting for their vision of the Turkish Republic.