Even before the Gezi Park uprisings this June, staff writer Cansu Colakoglu had been a vehement critic of Turkey’s turn away from secularism. In a brief, prescient article published in mid-May, she wrote of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the organization’s march toward political Islamism.
When more than three million gathered in and around Taksim Square in the old quarter of Istanbul starting May 28 this year, she was on the frontlines, documenting the government’s violence and the eccentric dynamics of the protest movement. Below are a series of three texts written by Colakoglu. The first is a brief article from mid-May—originally published as part of an HPR “Religion in Politics” symposium. The second is a dispatch from the day of the uprisings, and the third documents the protests’ messy aftermath. —Gram Slattery, Associate Managing Editor
May 21, 2013 — “Undue Influence in Turkey”
Religion tends to be an essential component of the political scene in the Middle East, even if a given country isn’t officially an Islamic republic. I come from Turkey and even though the Turkish government is theoretically secular, religion is the primary decision-making factor in politics.
An Islamist party, the AKP, rules the country. This is their second term. Not surprisingly, they use religious arguments and images to earn the votes of the majority of the middle and lower classes. Due to the outside funding they get through religious interest groups, they are able to remain economically stable. Moreover, the face of the party, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is very good at targeting non-followers: there is a clear distinction between people who support the party, and those who do not. This distinction is shown as a difference in religiosity and faith rather than plain political views. Anyone who criticizes government policy faces consequences as drastic as getting jailed.
Unlike the ruling regime, my personal understanding of how my religion contributes to my political beliefs can better be described as my religion interfering with my political beliefs. And in a country where politicians use faith as a political tool, it is very hard to establish an objective sense of religion for oneself.
June 1, 2013 — “Taking Back Turkey”
Turkey has woken up from its sleep during the AKP’s fascist regime.
Five days ago, a group of protestors started a demonstration in Gezi Park, in the middle of Istanbul’s European center, Taksim. The AKP plans to destroy the park and build a shopping mall. Two days ago, the police attacked protestors who were trying to save the trees there. The violence did not end then, and Istanbul started to gather in the square. The police occupied all of the streets that end at Taksim in the afternoon. My dad, a friend of mine and I somehow made it to Taksim and started waiting for the larger group that was on Istiklal Avenue to enter the square. The group in Istiklal consisted of tens of thousands of people, and they managed to push the police back toward the square. The police attacked the protestors with gas bombs and water cannons. As of now, one man has been murdered by a water cannon with four others dead due to gas bombs and panzers.
In the square, while we were waiting in a restaurant that had opened its doors to protestors—since that was pretty much the only space we could breathe in—the police suddenly approached and threw gas bombs into the restaurant and chased the crowd in front of the restaurant into the place with batons. This is not a story I heard and am telling secondhand; this is what happened to me last night.
The battle in Taksim lasted until 3 p.m. today. At 3:30 p.m. the government announced that the police has been ordered to step back. They did not actually step back, but the gas fire ceased for a while. Around 4 p.m., millions gathered in Gezi Park. Taksim was filled with people. There were no policemen, but we suffered from gas bombs occasionally thrown from a helicopter.
Around 8 p.m. things got ugly again. Since the police had left Taksim, they moved to Besiktas, which is one of the European centers on Turkey’s Bosphorus shore. An actual battle started in Besiktas. Policemen threw gas bombs into Bahcesehir University and the Mimar Sinan University and State Conservatory. The security guard of Mimar Sinan, who I know personally, has been hospitalized; his face was destroyed by a bullet. The question is whether it was a plastic or an actual bullet. The answer is what we fear.
Around 10 p.m., I heard that one of my high school friends was detained. He arrived home safely after spending around 14 hours in custody. We know that there are 939 people still under custody as of now. Their crime is having protested. Protest is our constitutional right, found in Article 34 of Turkey’s constitution.
Right now, thousands still are on their way to Besiktas. The same is happening in Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, Edirne, Mersin, Eskisehir, Adana, Kayseri, Konya and in many more cities. If you know a bit about Turkey, you will realize that this list not just of relatively liberal cities, but also very conservative ones like Konya and Kayseri. Furthermore, demonstrations have erupted throughout today in San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Chicago, Paris, Munich, Oxford, and Madrid, among other locations.
As of now, 53 people are officially injured, but looking at how many were and are out there, that number is ridiculously low. Additionally, the police continue to gas bomb the places that hold many injured people, endangering their lives, such as the universities in Besiktas that I listed above.
Pharmacies are giving out gas masks and medicine for free. Lawyers and doctors are offering their services for free as well.
This is not happening because trees were being destroyed. This is because we have been stripped of the right to talk, to protest. This is because our journalists are in jail. This is because the prime minister still says his government does not care what we do and they will continue with the Gezi Project. This is because people are in custody because they used their right to protest. This is because the government made the police attack the Gezi protesters.
The government is not serving its people, it’s killing them.
This is what’s happening in Turkey. I would not call it a Turkish Spring: we don’t need revolution. This is Turkey, taking its secular democracy back. No more corruption, no more radical Islamism!
June 7, 2013 — “Gezi Park: The Aftermath”
Last Saturday, the day after the uprising, I left home to go to Besiktas around 1 p.m. My plan was to go help the people who were cleaning up in Besiktas, walk to Taksim to join the protestors in the square, and then move on to Gezi Park. In my backpack I had two bottles of Talcid, or Rennie solution—which eases the pain in one’s eyes after being tear gassed. I also had swimming goggles—which had protected me relatively well on Friday night—two gas masks, two bottles of water, my raincoat, and a Turkish flag.
A friend of mine and I met another friend in Besiktas who had been there for the last 48 hours, helping people during the police’s violent attack. He went around with a bottle of Talcid/Rennie solution in his hand also carrying the injured on the streets into the university building. I saw his blood type written on his arm; he told us that we couldn’t walk around without that, just in case. I wrote 0Rh+ on my left arm with thick black ink.
We decided to walk through Dolmabahce Road and go up the hill through Gumussuyu to Taksim Square to see what Dolmabahce looked like after the previous night’s police violence. On the way, we saw a couple boys collecting the wasted gas bombs from the Dolmabahce Palace garden. Dolmabahce Palace is where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who started our war of independence after World War I in 1919 and founded the Republic of Turkey, lived in his last years. It is among Ataturk’s most important memorials. We decided to join the gas bomb clean up.
On the way to the Palace’s entrance, three tourists asked us what was going on. We told them that millions were protesting against the government for democracy all around the country. One of them asked, “Well, you vote, right, so it is democracy. What else is there to ask for?” He had made a very serious mistake. Democracy doesn’t only mean elections; it does not end there. I replied to the tourist we could ask for freedom of speech, to start with. I should be able to speak my mind. My high school friend got detained for photographing the protest; there are journalists, authors in jail for expressing their opinions. Saying that we have democracy does not mean the government is democratic. To vote is only one of my rights, and I respect the outcome although I did not vote for this government. However, after the elections, the government is obligated to serve the whole country without discriminating against anyone. The police are not anyone’s personal army; their duty is to serve the people, to work for the people, not attack them.
Leaving the tourists, we entered the Dolmabahce Palace garden from its main gate, going through the security control. We proceeded to a little grass area and started collecting the wasted gas bombs. On the bombs it says, “Do not target anyone when firing,” which is exactly what the police had been doing for four days all around Turkey.
We had collected about thirty bombshells in a bag by the time one middle-aged civil official came up to us and asked what we were doing. We said we were collecting bomb waste to keep Dolmabahce clean. He did not say anything and left. He came back in five minutes with ten more men. They said they were palace security, and that it was illegal for us to be in that green space. The palaces are guarded by the police, so we figured these people were civil policemen. We said it does not say visitors are prohibited from that space–there truly were no signs. One of them said it was not our job to clean this place. The policemen then physically threw us out of the public palace space. Later that night, I saw the Turkish Lawyers Association’s announcement on the Internet asking everyone to collect any gas bomb wastes they found as evidence to sue police forces.
Leaving the palace with rage, we walked up to Taksim Square from Gumussuyu along with hundreds of other people. You could not move in Gezi Park; I had never seen a crowd that big. And it was not just any crowd, I saw people with flags of a very conservative party (Saadet Partisi), I saw people with head scarves, I saw people with LGBTQ flags, I saw the Kurdish party, I saw people giving out bottles of water for free, I saw artists, journalists. So, no, on the contrary to what the media says, this was not a solely secular crowd. The Prime Minister said on TV that day that he was barely keeping the 50 percent who voted for him at home. He implied that 50 percent of the voters were angrily waiting at home, wishing to stop this uprising against the government.
Let me tell you another anecdote from yesterday to prove that wrong:
I bumped into a friend in the square yesterday. We met a week ago in a seminar program on Turkey’s role in global economics and politics. Because the seminar discussions were not politicized, he said he had no idea I was against the government and that he was glad to see that. I told him that I was, to be honest, surprised to see that he was protesting. He said if it were three days ago, he would have listed the accomplishments of the AKP government and have defended them to me, but that this police violence was unacceptable and that he was against the government’s undemocratic, dictatorial attitude. He said his brother, who was a very strong AKP follower, had been in Besiktas the whole night resisting the police attacks. So, no, as someone who protested side by side in Gezi with a friend who had approved of the AKP until now, I cannot believe the PM’s unrealistic assessment.
For days people cheered in Taksim, and the police started gas bombing and using their water cannons around 8 p.m. each evening. In Istanbul, everyone still gathered in Taksim, in Besiktas, on Bagdat Avenue, Kuzguncuk, Cengelkoy and in many more areas of the city on the Asian side. People still protest by clashing pots together on their balconies, turning the lights on and off over and over again in their homes.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has gone off to Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria. He left the country when the whole nation was protesting against him. Were we surprised? Not really.
Photo Credit: Cansu Colakoglu/Harvard Political Review
Letters from Istanbul
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