The “Gezi Resistance” in Ankara
Re-upping my piece for 3rd anniversary of Gezi Protests in Turkey
In these days the depressing landscape of Turkish opposition is revived by a wave of nostalgic tweets and photos under the hashtag #gezi3yasinda, “Gezi is 3 years old”: the protests that began to block the destruction of a park and escalated to involve 77 of Turkey’s 81 provinces are recalled like a Golden Age.
Those days’ disconcert and anger fade into romanticized memories because of the relief that many felt in making their voice heard and resonating in the whole country.
Only one year ago the second anniversary of the so called “Gezi Protests” went almost unnoticed.
It was little more than a week before the general elections, expectations were understandably high and so was the fear of deranging the elections.
Now hope and faith in a change through the electoral process have faded into a daily nightmare of fallen soldiers’ funerals, car bombings, prosecution of journalists and persecution of academics.
But beside the romantic memories of an extraordinary time, the “Gezi phenomenon” is still indecipherable. The very size of the protests made them hard to analyze. Unaffiliated individuals as well as organized groups from any side participated en masse.
One of the iconic images of Gezi was people doing at the same time the leftist “V” salute and the “Wolf sign” of the right wing Nationalists, in a display of unity. If asked about the aim of the protest, each group or person would give a different answer but they all agreed on one thing: they wanted their democracy to be functional, they wanted the freedom that had been promised.
They all wanted a diverse society where it was possible to practice Turks’ favorite sport, to argue with each other, without being delegitimized or prosecuted.
Fethullah Gülen, the cleric who would have become Erdogan’s nemesis, urged restraint and called for dialogue. Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of the pro-Kurdish party, paid lip service to the protester’s reasons but didn’t support them to preserve the peace process with PKK. In hindsight, he missed a historical chance: while two years later his HDP would have won a Pyrrhic victory on a platform largely based on Gezi principles the peace process failed and the renewed conflict with PKK is wreaking unprecedented havoc in the South East.
But individual Kurds were present in the streets, teaching people how to build barricades in western Turkey’s cities, often side by side with veterans who had served in the Kurdish regions.
This unity did not last but the first anniversary was almost as significant as the protests itself.
It was the last time that major crowds took to the streets, even if with a fraction of the June 2013 numbers and the brutality of the repression was unprecedented.
It was the end of a tumultuous year.
After Gezi Park had been brutally cleared by the police, the protests took other shapes. Thousands of people all over Turkey followed the example of a lone dancer, nicknamed the “Duran Adam,” the standing man, for standing six hours staring in silence at the empty park.
A colored frenzy possessed the country after a municipality in Istanbul covered with grey paint the steps of a stairway that a man had painted rainbow: everything resembling stairs was painted in all colors, in a silent but visually loud protest.
Then another construction work started a new wave of protests, this time in Ankara: a road being built without authorization over a forest, in the elite Middle East Technical University campus.
There were protests every fortnight until May 2014, when a string of street riots began with the May Day celebration brutally repressed by riot police.
But only the death of Berkin Elvan, a 14 years old kid sent to buy bread and hit by a tear gas canister to the head, and the Soma disaster, when 301 miners died, had attracted crowds comparable to those of Gezi.
A large demonstration was supposed to take place in Ankara on October 10 2015 to ask to resume the peace process and end the conflict with PKK, furiously reignited in July by a bloody feud following the Suruç bombing. The twin suicide bombing in Ankara eclipsed the death toll of Suruç and spelled the end of any hope of mass protests in Turkey.
On the first anniversary of the police attack to Gezi Park it became clear that people had no intention of being gassed and beaten for nothing: any hope that street demonstrations would steer the government’s action into considering wishes and rights of those who didn’t vote for the ruling party had vanished.
Those who kept protesting knew that they would have been teargassed, beaten, shot with plastic bullets and often detained and even prosecuted for terrorism.
After Gezi, it was clear that the party which had won a majority with a mandate to renovate the country with democratic reforms now aimed to just stay in power.
It had been made clear with Erdogan’s infamous “Yesilkoy Speech,” when the returning, embattled PM threatened the protesters and publicly rebuked the conciliatory tunes that President Gül, Deputy PM Arinç and even Minister of Interior Güler had used to defuse the tension.
Everything that would happen in Turkey’s politics in the next three years was already in that speech but many international commentators, led by journalists who had not bothered to report from outside Taksim square and had the aura of “first hand witnesses,” preferred to consider the protests a failure, a last ditch attempt by the secular, left wing elites to regain power.
This mindset led statesmen like Carl Bildt to claim in October that “Turkey was on the right path”, utterly misunderstanding the direction of Erdogan’s Turkey on that path.
The December 2013 corruption scandal was another turning point, when three ministers’ sons and the CEO of a bank were arrested with stacks of cashes and wiretaps, then refuted, alleged the involvement of Erdogan’s family too. The dramatic week of December 17–25 2013, when police refused to execute prosecutors’ orders, the reported irregularities in the “Cat’s Blackout” elections on March 31 2014, the Soma disaster protests were all stages of the path that had become irreversible after the reaction to Gezi.
Now that even in the pro-Erdogan media the rhetoric of “democracy” has been replaced with calls of “obedience to the chief”, it’s unsurprising that people in Turkey looks back at the days of tear gas and water cannons with the nostalgic feeling of looking back at a turning point, a missed last chance.
