Istanbul is a city divided; it straddles the Bosphorus with the European continent on one side and the Asian continent on the other. It is the site to many laboured metaphors about clashing cultures, being at once cosmopolitan and ancient; legitimately both European and Middle-Eastern. A huge city, home to over 13 million people, it is conveniently broken up so that each section of it seems manageably conceivable, though in reality even each section is almost too big for a Dubliner to imagine. On asking where I was from, taxi drivers would laugh derisively at the small population size of Ireland relative to Istanbul. The sea air in summer also lends a balmy and sweet temperance to its climate allowing one to breathe easily without the exhaustion of dry heat. Since Friday the 31st of May though, the winds of Istanbul have carried with them the sharp sting of tear gas, as they have in the capital Ankara and in cities all over Turkey.
The Taksim Uprising, or as Wikipedia would have it, The 2013 Turkey protests, have their roots at Gezi Park in the commercial centre of Istanbul. The park could be compared to Stephen’s Green Park, which would make the high street of Istiklal Avenue the Turkish Grafton Street. They occupy a very similar position in their respective environments. Stephen’s Green lacks an equivalent to Taksim square though, the massive space between Gezi Park and Istiklal avenue. Last year the Turkish government announced plans to pedestrianize the square by moving the traffic running through it underground in an enormous redevelopment project. Then, in November, they announced that in addition to this they would be demolishing Gezi Park and replacing it with a shopping mall built in the shape of an Ottoman barracks. These plans fit in with two strong trends in the Turkish government of a harkening glorification of the country’s Ottoman past and feeding an inflated property construction bubble. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Tayyip Erdogan has been in power for ten years, combining religious social conservatism with neoliberal economics. They have successfully limited the role of the military who had maintained an unusually large presence in Turkish political life since the conception of the state and galvanised the support of a growing Muslim business class. With that though has come extreme gentrification & crony capitalism, and a para-militarization of the police.
The Taksim Platform was formed in that November by local business owners, city planners, architects and intellectuals to protest the redevelopment of Taksim. A few Greenpeace activists also set up tents in the park in anticipation of resisting the bulldozers that would eventually come to destroy one of the few remaining green public spaces left in the city.
The big change came on the 26th of May. Activists camping in the park, mobilised by a statement made by Prime Minister Erdogan that the demolition of the park would proceed despite protest, were violently dispersed by police with tear gas and pepper spray. Overnight this caused the size of the camp’s population to grow from a few dozen to a few hundred. Dawn raids made by the police over the next few days would see the size increase dramatically, from a few hundred to a few thousand. What began as a local issue transcended environmentalism and matured into a protest against the privatisation of public space and a right to the city. Then, on the morning of May 31st, another dawn raid continued into the afternoon as an all-out assault, culminating in the shepherding of protesters by police down into the metro station on Taksim square. Police then lobbed canisters of tear gas into the station and locked the doors, killing at least one and injuring dozens. It would be indicative of the brutal punishment tactics the police would employ over the coming weeks, with at least 7 more confirmed deaths and nearly 8000 more injuries. Police fired hundreds of tear gas projectiles at protesters that day, choking the heart of Istanbul with bellowing clouds of biting chemical fog. What was previously a local issue about a park and the right to public space suddenly exploded into a bona fide social uprising against the government itself. The theretofore apolitical were left aghast at the overt police brutality which they could literally taste. That night, thousands of protesters swarmed onto Istiklal avenue, marching towards confrontation with the police at Taksim square, and the next day; retook the park and would turn it into what one English language Turkish newspaper called “a utopic Freetown.” While there would still be several fatal skirmishes between police and protesters over the following weeks, the police did not clear the park until the 15th of June. During that intermittent period, Istiklal Avenue, Taksim Square and Gezi Park were occupied territory. Decorated with multi-coloured political flags and to the tunes of Turkish language Spanish civil war anthems, one protester described the festive atmosphere as a “radical carnival.” You couldn’t walk down the road for five minutes without hearing Bella Ciao or A Las Barricadas. It was a powerful release of pressures that are well understood in Turkey but rarely acknowledged outside it.
Walking through the park each day from its recapture, it was startling to see how the organisation would grow more sophisticated on a daily basis. A shelf filled with books became a library of 6000, with librarians working in shifts. By the end there was a crèche, an infirmary, a huge food distribution area (demarcated by appropriated police cordons), and even a vet. If water or certain amenity was needed, they would let word filter out through the camp onto social media, and donations would soon come in. All of it informed by a strong sense of civic duty. There were even plastic bags affixed to trees which people could take and use to pick up rubbish, and they were used. The most bizarre part of it all though was the shared sense of purpose and solidarity. Even the left is aggressively sectarian in Turkey, the socialists do not protest alongside the communists, but here you had communists, anarchists, socialists, feminists, LGBT activists, nationalists, kurds, muslims, the apolitical, football hooligans, the very young and the very old. It became a trope to remark on how strange it was to see flags of Atatürk hanging alongside flags of Abdullah Öcalan.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the founder of the modern Turkish republic, which he founded based on a combination of nationalism, statism, populism, and secularism. His self-given surname literally means “father of Turks” and he is an icon among Turks in general, but nationalist militants in particular, and they tend to strongly dislike Kurds. Abdullah Öcalan meanwhile is the founder and leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), an armed separatist group that has been fighting the Turkish government in a civil war for an independent Kurdistan for thirty years, with a ceasefire only having been reached last March. Though the PKK is generally seen as having abandoned its originally leftist politics, Öcalan remains something of an icon for Kurds, who are subject to extreme repression in Turkey. Merely wearing Kurdish colours is enough to warrant arrest, and Kurds aren’t allowed to use their Kurdish names on government documents, but must use additional Turkish names. That’s why it was strange just to see flags of Öcalan in the middle of Istanbul, but to see them beside flags of Ataturk was absolutely mind-blowing. Even the notoriously rowdy Istanbul football supporters clubs, who are more than used to tearing strips off each other, were marching down Istiklal Avenue with the scarves of their rival teams tied together. One impressed protester said “I used to think football was a distraction from politics, but seeing their level of street energy resisting the police, it made me think ‘maybe football hooliganism isn’t so bad after all.”
A tall athletic Kurdish activist from Gazi Mahalessi in Istanbul said there has been a real perception breakthrough in the park. “The nationalists who saw themselves as the natural inheritors of the state saw the same news which excluded Kurds before, was portraying them as troublemakers. They saw the news and realised they were also marginal now also. So this has added much to the our struggle for human rights. The perception that things can change has become much more realistic.” Indeed, Turkey’s press has been notoriously vulnerable to censorship, the country has the highest proportion of journalists in jail in the world, and while CNN international was showing images of demonstrators being blasted with water cannons that contained a pepper spray solution; CNN Turk was showing a documentary about penguins.
Some of the fiercest clashes between police and protesters in Istanbul occurred in Besiktas, a short walk from Taksim square, during the first few days of the demonstrations.
Yeliz is a student of the private Bahçeşehir University on the coast of the European continent in Beşiktaş. “Of course it started long before, but Friday and Saturday were so severe. They said to the kids ‘we are going to kill you. We will take you to a place without cameras and beat you to death. So you better be prepared.’ It was so severe and we were so traumatised. Even the most apolitical person was shocked by this. Ankara’s minister tweeted that ‘We could drown all of you in a spoonful of water’. It’s not even black humour, it’s scary. How could a politician say this?”
“So on Sunday, I wanted to go to help my friends. Not at the barricades, they said it’s too severe. If you don’t really have a proper gas mask and everything, then don’t join us because otherwise you will be a burden. But we also need help with the injured people and I used to work in the search and rescue team of my university.”
BUSAR is the University of Bahçeşehir search and rescue team, affiliated with the Turkish Civil Defence. It was founded by Oğulcan Sözen, who wanted to do something to help after the 1999 earthquake. On the 31st of May; the first day of the citywide protests, BUSAR made the official decision to don their orange uniforms and try to provide aid to the injured.
The University was turned into a makeshift infirmary, and Yemiz recalled the scene inside on the Sunday. “There was one guy who was shot by a plastic bullet in the head and was bleeding, another was shot in the belly and was bleeding like hell. We didn’t have any doctors and we were trying to help, all the roads to the hospitals were closed. Then, the door of the university was gas bombed, and we really panicked. There was tear gas everywhere, and they’re not supposed to be allowed to attack on private property, especially on universities. It was attacked twice again that night, and we were really frightened because we were trapped. You could barely see outside with all the gas, and the only masks we had were surgeon’s masks; like tissues. Eventually we got out through the back entrance to the harbour down the road and onto a boat. As we were leaving though, police threw a gas grenade onto the boat; people were crying and screaming. And there were people running to the boat in the gas cloud. It was so scary because people could have fallen into the sea, anything could have happened. So I got to the other side, but then things got worse at the university. My friends live in Beşiktaş but they couldn’t even go back home because police were arresting everyone, and civil police were trying to get into the campus but university security weren’t letting them into the building. It was absurd. We were trying to help injured people, and the civil police were trying to arrest us. What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to let these people die? The next day it was gassed again and for a long time they were really trapped, and the police were at the doors. They again eventually escaped from the port side to a ship sent by the owner of the university.”
Yemiz still wanted to help but there weren’t enough gas masks in the Search and Rescue inventory, so she helped by providing a degree of coordination through her phone, her computer, and her high speed broadband connection. “I was more on the logistics side of it, spreading the word, and keeping people safe. I had a map in front of me and people were calling me and I would tell them “go there, run away from here, there is police blockage here”, trying to lead people in the safest direction around the police, and telling people who were resisting police where support was needed. One of my friends was injured when a gas projectile hit him in the leg. They’re not used to scare people, but are aiming at people to hurt them. It’s terrifying because you’re defenceless.”
Another fear was that after the protests began to lose steam, demonstrators would be tracked down through facebook and twitter and arrested in their homes. This has already started happening. Yemiz said though that “if you are more involved in politics as a student, you should expect to be targeted.
Most of my friends ran away from Turkey even before this happened because there is a search order from the police about them. And they are students. One of our friends from a different university is in jail for a year and a half just because he was wearing a Pusi (keffiyeh) scarf associated the Kurdish cause, had a poster of Deniz Gezmish the leftist leader who has been called the Turkish Che Guevara, and owned the books of Marx. Everybody has the books of Marx, we are students. You can’t study social science or history without studying Marx.” Even before the Uprising, there was a tendency also to target casual demonstrators for arrests even more than hardcore activists, as a police intimidation tactic. One Trotskyist activist told me that “you’re just as likely to be arrested going to protests as a feminist as a revolutionary communist.”
Throughout the Taksim Uprising, students were at the fore, which is unfortunate for them because it began on the first day of exams. According to Yemiz, “people were going to exams in gas masks, it was insane. Some couldn’t even go to the exam, and two exams were actually delayed because the school was totally damaged. You go to school and it’s like a war.” Organised labour is in disarray in Turkey, and union organisers not beholden to the government are routinely hassled and arrested, so it did not result in government-crippling strikes as perhaps May 68’ did in Paris. However, the government has been forced to capitulate to the demands about the park and the square. Far more important though, is that this was the first time in Turkish political history, not only that government opposition shared the same space together, but even that the left shared the same space. Students too have received an explicitly political education at the hands of the police and the government. In attempting to brazenly privatise a city park, Erdogan and the AKP accidentally created a much larger public space where very different people could and did come together. The Uprising may have all but ended, but public forums continue, and it will hold a central place in Turkish social memory for a long time. As more than one person I talked to put it; “it’s not a revolution, but it’s a revolutionary moment.”
Güher was working as a volunteer for the library in Gezi park at the height of its development, which days later was destroyed by police. A recent psychology graduate, she said “I feel united for the first time in my country, I feel belonging here, and I haven’t felt that for a long time. I was thinking about moving to another country and was very serious about that, but now, I’m like, I have to stay. There are people like me and they are against something. They are awake and united for the first time. We are writing the history here.”
Names have been changed to protect the identities of sources
