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Jun 2013
What Turkey is witnessing today is a broad-based popular rebellion against the authoritarianism of its conservative neoliberal Islamist establishment.
Originally published by WhatIsHappeningInIstanbul.com, a grassroots initiative in citizen journalism aimed at covering the ongoing protests in Turkey and posing a counterbalance to the co-opted corporate media.
It started with hundreds of peaceful protesters resisting the demolition of Gezi Park, one of the very few green spaces left in the center of Istanbul. There are plans to replace it with yet another shopping mall. The disproportionate police response to the peaceful Gezi protests has triggered a nationwide revolt within a matter of days. What we have witnessed since the early hours of May 30 is not only a display of the collective will of Istanbul residents claiming their right to the city but also a broad-based rebellion against the authoritarianism of Turkey’s conservative neo-liberal Islamist government.
Hundreds of thousands of people of all ages and political stripes have united around slogans such as “shoulder to shoulder against fascism,” and calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan. The protests have spread from Istanbul to Ankara, İzmir, Adana, Eskişehir, Samsun, Konya and Mersin among other cities, despite the brutal and relentless attacks by the police. From the very beginning of the protests, Turkish police used water cannons and tear gas against the demonstrators. The streets of Istanbul and other cities have become battlefields; hundreds have been hospitalized and several unconfirmed deaths have been reported.
As this unprecedented wave of protests spread across Turkey, there was an unofficial news blackout across the mainstream media. The censorship of Turkish media has increased sharply in the last few years. According to Reporters Without Borders’ 2012 report, Turkey has become “the world’s biggest prison for journalists.” Protesters have been mobilizing nevertheless, mainly through social media.
Despite the clear dangers posed by an unrestrained police force, people have taken to the streets without fear. This ongoing protest is unique and historic, not only because the people insist in ever greater numbers on reclaiming the streets from the riot police, but also because it represents the hope for a genuine people’s movement beyond the usual political factions.
The protesters of #OccupyGezi are anything but a homogeneous group. It is comprised of millions of people from all over the country, young and old, leftists and nationalists, liberals and Kemalists, middle class and working class, believers and atheists, gays, lesbians, transsexuals and football fans, all united by one collective demand – the end of AKP authoritarianism. There is no central political organization bringing these groups together, yet the protesters have displayed enormous solidarity.
The protest aligns them. The affect of being together in this revolt unites them. The will to end authoritarianism and police brutality motivates them to revolt. The desire to preserve common public spaces and to resist their appropriation by local/global capital empowers them.
The reaction against the brazen force used on the Gezi Park protesters was the culmination of a series of incursions into basic liberties: the bombing of civilians in Roboski in December 2011; last month’s bomb attacks in the border town of Reyhanlı; the restrictions on women’s reproductive rights; the major crackdown on 1 May demonstrations; the recent curbs on the sale of alcohol; the onslaught of neo-liberal capitalist attacks on historical and cultural landmarks such as Emek movie theater and the port areas of Karaköy, Beşiktaş and Kadıköy in Istanbul; and the breaking ground for the widely unpopular third bridge across the Bosphorous, have all contributed to the widespread discontent on display.
What must appear at first glance as a simple protest about trees was infused with passionate frustration by a citizenry that has finally lost patience with the autocratic and clearly undemocratic tendencies of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan who has been touted as a beacon of democracy by the global ruling elite. The people on the streets of Turkey send a clear message to the world today: democracy will not be coopted. Erdoğan has famously called for other leaders — Mubarak, Gaddafi, and most recently Assad — to listen to the voice of their people. It’s time he started to listen to his own.
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01 Jun 2013
A Turkish academic reflects on the ongoing protests in her country, sketching an ambiguous image of a curious coalition that may yet bring a new era.
Editor’s note: this update on the situation in Istanbul was kindly shared with us by an anonymous reader. We are in the process of confirming the identity of the author to make sure we are not unnecessarily endangering anyone, but we decided to already share the text here because it provides a crucial and timely insight into the dynamics of revolt on the ground in Turkey.
Things are pretty crazy here in Istanbul. We have been breathing tear gas for three days now, the police were pouring tons of gas and water with cannons or shooting gas pistols. People got hit in the leg, back, head. But crowds in Izmir, Ankara and several other cities are also clashing with the police. They turned off all the street lights in Taksim yesterday evening. Hundreds of people are being treated in hospitals. But ordinary people are opening up their houses, offices and restaurants to cure the injured, although the police are also chasing protesters into the buildings to gas and beat them. In Ankara, tweets and one very brave TV channel say they have been using plastic bullets. The injuries are severe. We need to keep on communication (mainly through social media) to know what is happening over there.
In Istanbul, we took over Taksim square today after a wild day of being sprayed. The police retreated, but there is a tense lull, since protesters are still being sprayed in other neighborhoods in Istanbul. The prime minister declared that he will not back down on his plans for the transformation of everything under the sun into malls and upper-class residences. There seems to be a tension between the president and the PM, since the former is from the Gulen sect (fethullah gulen is a religious group with a modern facade that controls part of the media and has schools everywhere, including in the US). The president has called for calm and criticized police violence, but prime minister Erdogan must be turning really psychotic, since he keeps saying we’re a bunch of “provocateurs”, using a nauseatingly demagogic discourse. The protestors, he says, are preparing the ground for a new coup d’étât against his very “civilian-democratic” government!
Indeed, the number of Turkish flags at Gezi park this evening was disgustingly high. This is a curious coalition. The Kemalist-nationalist freaks of yesterday are now occupying the same park as the Kurds, the Left, the anarchists and the LGBTT groups. I’m not too sure of this, but I think football fans were instrumental in the victory over Gezi park today. We have three Istanbul teams, the supporters of which were out fighting the police like lions. When they’re in their stadium, I call them hooligans, but I have to admit that they know how to fight and aren’t afraid. How all this will combine into a meaningful statement against the government is still uncertain.
So things are all very ambiguous and, in any case, the fighting hasn’t ceased elsewhere than in Taksim. This is not a protest to save trees — the government has gone too far. Gezi park was the last straw, but we had to bear several other things in the past few months: arrests of Kurds and activists on absurd charges; changes in school curricula imposing religion courses on kids; attempts to ban abortion; the bombing of Kurdish civilians crossing the Turco-Iraqi border (mistaking them for the guerilla); the tug-of-war with Syria; the mysterious bomb that killed fifty at Reyhanli on the Syrian border; attempts to limit the consumption of alcohol; giant projects to change the whole face of Istanbul; naming the third Bosphoros bridge after an Ottoman sultan who nearly annihilated the Alevite population (the non-Sunni branch of Islam in Turkey); and lastly the Gezi park project…
Meanwhile, the Kurds gathered 500 Turkish intellectuals, journalists and civil society leaders in Ankara last weekend to draw up an alternative peace plan. I attended this and was so impressed by how people began to take control of their lives, started avowing their crimes vis-à-vis one another (the Kurds participated in the Armenian genocide, for instance, and LGBTT groups are reviled by the Marxist left), and drew concrete demands to impose their will on the government’s reductionist view of peace.
In short: I feel that this is the beginning of the end of an era! We need to bring down this government, but what will come in its place is the most important question today. Please keep on supporting us and keep sharing the news!
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01 Jun 2013
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01 Jun 2013
These protests are not about the trees; they are about a particular logic of government that violently imposes neoliberalism irrespective of the people.
The conviction that Turkey is a success story of economic growth and democratization holds on a number of assumptions. It reduces economic prosperity to the numerical increase in the GDP while ignoring social injustice, income inequality, precarious employment, labor fatalities and so forth. It reads stable democracy as a commitment to consecutive elections, absence of military coups, and majoritarian rule, while turning a blind eye to the human rights violations, and the political repression of minorities.
Indeed, Turkey is a “success” story of environmental degradation to create sites of construction and profiteering, of cultural and historical destruction to build hundreds of fortresses of mass consumption. It is also a “success” story of police growth and paramilitarization, of the suppression of activists, journalists, academics and artists. The ongoing events in Istanbul very well portray this “success” story.
For several days, a group of Istanbulite people occupied Taksim Gezi Park to resist against its demolition. A while ago, the AKP government decided, without negotiating with the people of Istanbul, to run a project for the reconstruction of the Taksim Square, the most central location of the city. The project included the demolition of the Gezi Park, and its replacement with a shopping mall based on the replication of an old military barracks (Topçu Kışlası) which used to exist there, until the early 1940s.
For the last two days, the riot police cracked down before the sunrise on peaceful protesters who were camping on the Gezi Park. The police destroyed their tents and set them on fire.
On Friday morning, the riot police surrounded the entire Gezi Park and blocked the protesters’ access. Since then, thousands of fellow Istanbulites came to Taksim Square to support the resistance. Yet, the Turkish police embarked on warfare against peaceful demonstrators with excessive use of gas bombs and water cannons. Violent police repression injured more than 100 people, many of them needing to be hospitalized.
Social media accounts claim that ambulances were not allowed to enter the square, while several injured people were asking for help. Doctors were called to provide voluntary assistance, and mobile clinics were set up. The whole day, the police did not stop firing tear gas and terrorized Taksim Square and the entire neighborhood.
Despite ongoing police brutality, the number of protesters increased and many fellow Istanbulites, mostly organized through social media, continued to arrive to occupy Taksim Gezi Park. In the evening, riot police blocked the entrance to the square. They encountered thousands of protesters rallying through Istiklal Street. It is reported that mobile networks were blocked and security cameras were turned off to prevent the streaming of the incidences.
For hours, riot police kept shooting gas bombs and pressured water against the protesters from behind their barricades. At midnight, they violently started cracking down on the gathering on Istiklal Street. Still, many people continue to resist and are making calls for a bigger demonstration throughout the weekend.
The ongoing protests in Istanbul are not simply about the removal of some trees in Gezi Park. They are about a particular logic of government. It is a logic that authoritatively and violently imposes destructive and profit-making policies irrespective of the people, their cities, their history and their environment.
We, the Collettivo Prezzemolo, express our solidarity with our comrades resisting yet against another authoritarian government and system among others in Europe and the world, where anything, including murdering people and destroying the environment, can be done for the sake of guaranteeing the profits of a handful of bosses, CEO’s and banks.
We share the protesters’ dreams of a town, a city, a world that is organized and built more democratically, according to the needs of a society freed from neoliberal impositions of uniform ways of living, producing and consuming through violence and suppression.
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