"It started out about a park,
but now it's about everything," someone tweeted in the middle of the night
as protesters fought police in Istanbul's Taksim Square.
The events began on
Monday morning 28 May, when some 50 protesters stood in front of the bulldozers
about to attack the trees in Gezi Park, adjacent to Taksim Square. In the
following days, the park was occupied around the clock by youth in affinity
with the global Occupy movement and others determined to save one of the city's
last green spaces. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had announced that the
Ottoman military barracks that once stood on this site would be reconstructed
to house a shopping centre and condominiums, alongside a new mosque. The
symbolic and provocative nature of his announcement became even more apparent
when it came out that he had decided to rip up the trees now and bring in the
architects later.
This project represented
the intersection of Islamism and the most speculative and monopolistic aspects
of Turkish capitalism under Erdogan. The purpose was to demolish a square
centred on a monument to Mustafa Kamel Ataturk, who transformed Turkey's
shattered Ottoman Empire by founding a secular republic after World War I, and
make developers and financiers linked to the prime minister's inner circle even
more filthy rich.
At 5 am on Friday 31
May, police attacked. They fired rounds of tear gas into tents with people
sleeping in them, including children, sent in bulldozers to roll over
everything and set fire to the encampment. Hundreds of protesters, journalists
and passers-by were injured. An attempted sit-in was dispersed. Instead of
putting an end to the protests, this assault made many thousands of people from
all walks of life feel that they had to come to the rescue. Some people
chanted, "Thanks, Tayyip, for the wake-up call."
Youth throwing stones
and other objects fought back against police in pitched battles that lasted all
day and all night. The next day, the police withdrew from the square and
protesters closed off the entrances with high barricades built of cobblestones
and appropriated police crowd control barriers, street signs and other items.
Supporters left their cars and buses to block police access. Nearby apartment
dwellers offered their facilities for protesters. The square was turned into a
place for political debate, concerts and dancing, a lunch area for curious and
supportive office workers, and home away from home for people who came for
their first-ever political protest and never left. It acquired a first aid
station and a library.
Many people didn't come
with the intention of fighting but under attack did so anyway. There were jokes
on the theme of "Gezi gazzi" – I couldn't help it, I was gassed
(drunk), or I was tired but I got gassed up at Gezi.
They were high school
and university students and teachers (the universities suspended final exams);
artists, architects, city planners and other intellectuals (some of the very
first demonstrators); doctors and lawyers (their associations defended the protesters,
and many came to help them); slum youth and their parents, many of Kurdish
origin; white collar workers and businesspeople; shopkeepers (often handing out
lemons and milk to sooth eyes burned by tear gas and pepper gas); pushcart
peddlers; and housewives of all backgrounds, including traditional peasant
families, some covered, most not. A few days later the two public service union
confederations called a two-day strike and their members joined the youth.
Heedless of the protest,
the prime minister held the scheduled ceremony inaugurating the construction of
a third bridge across the Bosphorus, a project designed to delight real estate
and financial speculators and bring the final expulsion of the lower classes
and nature itself from that part of the city. Speaking of the Gezi
demonstrators, he said, "It doesn't matter what you do. We made a decision
and we will follow through with that decision." The bridge, he announced,
would be named Yavez (the Great) Sultan Selim, after the sixteenth-century
hereditary ruler who made the Ottoman Empire a caliphate (Islamic state), also
infamous for the slaughter of members of the Alevi religious minority.
While the main TV
channels were broadcasting beauty pageants and cooking shows and ignoring the
news, the Twitter hashtag #Direngeziparki became the world's most popular, with
25 million people following it. Erdogan was to label Twitter and other social
media "the worst menace to society."
Led by a commandeered
construction vehicle originally brought in to demolish the park, youth attacked
the Prime Minister's Istanbul offices. Tens of thousands of people from the
part of the city on the other side of the Bosphorus confronted police and
marched across a bridge normally closed to pedestrians to join the protests.
A late-night aerial
video of the city shows lights blinking on and off in solidarity, in apartment
buildings stretching far across the city, and everywhere there is the din of
people beating pots and pans or banging spoons against street lamps, even in
Bulgurlu, considered a stronghold of Erdogan's AKP governing party.
To be continued...
Pix from rawstory.com
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