I live close to the Taksim Square. Today some of my friends who want to join the protestors offered to take me along with them. The protestors claim that it all started when the riot police set fire at 5:00AM to the tents of 50 protestors who had camped at Gezi Park to save a few trees from being cut down. I don't know if the allegations are true. The correct procedure was of course to apprehend those 50 individuals and escort them to the police station. Now there are thousands in Taksim Square, including unsympathetic tourists like myself. Are the police really responsible for this mess?
The protest area has become an unfamiliar place. I am not a tidy man myself but Taksim Square is a deeply disturbing sight. There are campers are inside the park. Absurd as it may sound, everything is free of charge. Sandwhiches, watermelons and everything else is given freely. Very disturbing! One can observe every shade of the left, including a group who are calling themselves the 'anticapitalist muslims'. The mufti of Istanbul must be banging his head on a wall in horror. Groups of PKK supporters, Kemalists, hardline socialists as well as fairly reasonable people protesting side by side, albeit in separate groups. It was strange to see admirers of Kemal Ataturk and Abdullah Ocalan blending peacefully instead of killing one another. There are young men lying on the grass. They are in shorts and showing off their hairy legs. Most of them have stopped shaving altogether. These campers are young people and are protesting against the only government they have ever known. What would they do if they knew some of the other governments that Turkey has known? There are hand-written signs all over the place. There is a ban on taking pictures but nobody can enforce it. It sure didn't stop me. They have set up a public library of sorts and even a vet for taking care of the park's animals who were injured in the rioting and the volleys of tear gas. There are no riot police to be seen but the place must be teeming with plain-clothes PCs. I saw a badly smashed up patrol car. Apparently the protestors found it unattended and then set fire to it. Some people were gluing their old shoes on the steps leading to the park. One group was singing under Ocalan banners. Another group was marching around with a sign saying something about a certain 'martyr' of their cause. On a more positive note, there were mots of normal people around as well, including my own friends. What was strikingly absent from Taksim Square was Turkey's conservative establishment. In Turkey, two-thirds of population always vote for the right and one third for the left. This basic pattern has not changed since the first free elections of republican Turkey. The protests are strictly left-wing. Right wing Turks are quiet and calm people unless provoked. The left, on the other hand, interpret progress as a struggle against the autrhorities. Tellingly, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party has ordered his supporters to stay away from these anti-government protests and that he was only interested in defeating the ruling AKP in polls next year. Thankfully, the underground station at Taksim is operational.
Government supporters are getting tired of protests and the ruling AKP has scheduled meetings in Ankara and Istanbul for next weekend. I decided to attend the Istanbul rally and will report on it next week. By the way, protests and meetings are insignificant in a legal or a political sense. A govenrment can only fall if defeated in elections. I know of no other way to force a government to resign. The armed forces have done that several times in the past but all of the coup-happy generals are now in dock answering charges of high treason. My gut feeling is that the demonstrators are a loud minority. They represen Turkey's historic one third minority who feel disenfranchised because the leaders of the left have no reasonable hope of coming first out of the ballot-box. In fact, it is even possible for these protests to have the opposite of the unintended effect. For some reason, the new constitution that would change Turkey's government to a presidential system did not go down well with Erdogan's power base. But now, these protests could become the wind that fill Erdogan's sail in the upcoming months. In Turkey, whenever the left takes to the streets and starts clamouring for attention, the conservatives hit back hard and win.
A
The protest area has become an unfamiliar place. I am not a tidy man myself but Taksim Square is a deeply disturbing sight. There are campers are inside the park. Absurd as it may sound, everything is free of charge. Sandwhiches, watermelons and everything else is given freely. Very disturbing! One can observe every shade of the left, including a group who are calling themselves the 'anticapitalist muslims'. The mufti of Istanbul must be banging his head on a wall in horror. Groups of PKK supporters, Kemalists, hardline socialists as well as fairly reasonable people protesting side by side, albeit in separate groups. It was strange to see admirers of Kemal Ataturk and Abdullah Ocalan blending peacefully instead of killing one another. There are young men lying on the grass. They are in shorts and showing off their hairy legs. Most of them have stopped shaving altogether. These campers are young people and are protesting against the only government they have ever known. What would they do if they knew some of the other governments that Turkey has known? There are hand-written signs all over the place. There is a ban on taking pictures but nobody can enforce it. It sure didn't stop me. They have set up a public library of sorts and even a vet for taking care of the park's animals who were injured in the rioting and the volleys of tear gas. There are no riot police to be seen but the place must be teeming with plain-clothes PCs. I saw a badly smashed up patrol car. Apparently the protestors found it unattended and then set fire to it. Some people were gluing their old shoes on the steps leading to the park. One group was singing under Ocalan banners. Another group was marching around with a sign saying something about a certain 'martyr' of their cause. On a more positive note, there were mots of normal people around as well, including my own friends. What was strikingly absent from Taksim Square was Turkey's conservative establishment. In Turkey, two-thirds of population always vote for the right and one third for the left. This basic pattern has not changed since the first free elections of republican Turkey. The protests are strictly left-wing. Right wing Turks are quiet and calm people unless provoked. The left, on the other hand, interpret progress as a struggle against the autrhorities. Tellingly, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party has ordered his supporters to stay away from these anti-government protests and that he was only interested in defeating the ruling AKP in polls next year. Thankfully, the underground station at Taksim is operational.
Government supporters are getting tired of protests and the ruling AKP has scheduled meetings in Ankara and Istanbul for next weekend. I decided to attend the Istanbul rally and will report on it next week. By the way, protests and meetings are insignificant in a legal or a political sense. A govenrment can only fall if defeated in elections. I know of no other way to force a government to resign. The armed forces have done that several times in the past but all of the coup-happy generals are now in dock answering charges of high treason. My gut feeling is that the demonstrators are a loud minority. They represen Turkey's historic one third minority who feel disenfranchised because the leaders of the left have no reasonable hope of coming first out of the ballot-box. In fact, it is even possible for these protests to have the opposite of the unintended effect. For some reason, the new constitution that would change Turkey's government to a presidential system did not go down well with Erdogan's power base. But now, these protests could become the wind that fill Erdogan's sail in the upcoming months. In Turkey, whenever the left takes to the streets and starts clamouring for attention, the conservatives hit back hard and win.
A
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