by Alev Scott
The AKP government wants to show that it is improving minority rights, and in March 2013 the Culture Minister, Ömer Çelik, publicly invited Greek and Armenian Christians who had left Turkey to return, promising that the current government had learned to include them in society. While that might be an ambitious claim, it has been at least partially supported by Patriarch Bartholomew, the head of the Greek Orthodox community in Turkey, who has been open about the fact that the current government has been better than previous ones in improving minority rights, Greeks’ and others’. He also says that there is still some way to go.
Will entirely peaceful and non-discriminatory co-existence between minorities in Turkey ever be attainable? Some say not; religious and cultural differences and resentment run too deep. I think it is attainable: the country is already naturally multicultural. Turks eat the same food as Greeks, Armenians, Arabs and Georgians, and share the same humour and superstitions, whether they know it or not. The last point is key, of course; I once got into an unexpectedly heated argument with a Turkish colleague who refused to countenance the idea that the Armenian dish topik was indeed Armenian rather than Turkish. While there are plenty of Turks like him, there are also, thankfully, plenty who not only admit the presence of minority cultures in Turkey but positively welcome their influence. From a minority perspective, the attitudes of individuals like the young half-Armenian boy I interviewed are very valuable. Tolerance and realism are needed on both sides; the boy never ignored the injustices done to past generations of his family, but he realised the need to progress in a rapidly developing country and get on with the many other minorities who make up its infinitely complex society.
12
Gezi Park: A New Chapter for Turkey
The Gezi protests of 2013 woke Turkey up. It was not a gentle awakening; it was a splash of cold water in the face for the public and the government alike. It woke me up to the latent political frustrations of the Turkish people, in the most unexpected and humbling way. Living in the midst of what felt like a revolution, it was difficult not to be affected by the emotions of tens of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets just outside. More tangibly, it was impossible not to be affected by the daily clouds of tear gas. Living through the Gezi protests was like teetering on the edge of a constant cliffhanger; no one knew what was going to happen next, and that was strangely thrilling. It was a period of intense uncertainty, but it made me much more certain about my feelings as a Turk because I was living through a dramatic period of change along with everyone else. It was a time of solidarity, when people communicated, collaborated and marched together for political change, with all the humour and courage and determination I should have expected from my years of observing Turks from the sidelines.
The movement had a strong communal mentality, a hivelike sense of purpose that kept it alive for much longer than anyone anticipated. People were killed and arrested, entirely peaceful demonstrations were suppressed, and still the protests continued. A month after the eruption of Gezi Park, the government estimated that 2.5 million people had demonstrated, and that number kept growing as summer passed.
The movement was an irrefutable, irrevocable step forward for democratic expression. Before the protests, I was convinced that Turks who disliked the government were hopelessly apathetic, unhappy but resigned to the current government for the foreseeable future. Friends and strangers discussed politics in restaurants and barber shops as though they were impassioned spectators of someone else’s game; after their discussions, these fierce debaters went home to their individual concerns. Mainstream politics certainly did not present any significant opposition to the government. Everyone assumed that supporters of the AKP outnumbered their opponents, and the latter were too disparate and scattered to amount to anything much. June 2013 changed all that. While the protests may not have had dramatic results in the short term, Turkey’s long-term political prognosis is now much more interesting than it would otherwise have been, because a previously silent opposition to the government has made itself heard, and discovered how loud its voice can be. The Gezi protest movement set the next stage in Turkey’s development as a democracy.
I live two minutes’ walk from Taksim Square and had often wandered through Gezi Park without giving it much thought. Coming from London and the glorious expanses of Hampstead Heath and Hyde Park, I had snobby views about its relatively garden-like size, which belied its name (gezi means ‘sightseeing’ or ‘tour’). In May 2013, the park was due to be cleared as part of the controversial Taksim Square redevelopment project, and in an effort to stop this, about fifty environmentalists camped out in the park in the path of encroaching bulldozers. To my shame, I remember walking past these people on my way to the metro and thinking, ‘You’ll never save those trees. Nice try.’
That was the last day of Gezi Park’s anonymity. At dawn the next day, 31 May 2013, police charged into the park, tearing down tents, spraying sleeping protesters in the face with pepper spray and beating anyone who resisted. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, people returned to the park, in ever increasing numbers. What had begun as a small environmentalist protest exploded into a spontaneous popular movement which included people entirely unrelated to any tree-hugging agenda. Many people objected in principle to the government’s plans to build over Taksim Square, traditionally an open space for political protest, and others objected to the police violence and went to lend support. Gezi proved to be the green light for previously unexpressed anger and served as something tangible to save, to fight for. It came to represent the many frustrations of many people.
The weeks following the initial Gezi occupation were filled with clashes between protesters and police. This period felt at times like stumbling onto the stage of Les Misérables, and at other times like living between the pages of 1984. The first ten days were the most exciting and felt the most revolutionary, because there was hope in the air and what felt like victory. To everyone’s astonishment, the police abandoned Taksim Square and the park, and there was a kind of unthreatening mob rule which was joyously anarchic. Joining the crowd felt like being a child again, running amok in a parentless house – deliciously liberating, but a little scary at the same time. The streets around Taksim were transformed: adrenaline-fuelled residents pulled paving stones up with their bare hands, building barricades on main roads to prevent police returning. Every night, they stood defiantly on these barricades with smudged faces and flags, shouting at the police who lurked further down the road like revolutionaries taunting royalist troops. Old ladies and children supported them by leaning out of their windows and banging pots and pans in an unholy frenzy of defiance. Young people, old people, leftists and Kemalists scrawled on walls and pavements with all the delight of children writing rude words on their teacher’s blackboard: ‘Government: resign!’ ‘Tayyip [Erdoğan] – run to your grandmother’s side!’ and my favourite: ‘Nothing will ever be as it was before. Dry your tears’ (a reference to the tear gas liberally used by riot police).
What caused this tirade of public outrage? The nominal cause was the government’s attempt to destroy Gezi Park, but this was just the trigger. It was not even the controversial redevelopment plan of Taksim Square. It was the culmination of years of frustration given outlet by the opportunity to respond to a clear-cut instance of oppression. The first few images of the chaos went viral on social media and suddenly everyone was talking about it. The timing was perfect: it was the beginning of summer, just the wrong time to destroy a park, and hordes of Istanbullus came to the rescue of persecuted activists in the hub of the city. They were fed up with incessant urbanisation, high-handed government decisions and a leader who seemed increasingly out of touch and authoritarian. These concerns had been simmering for a while, impossible to confront directly, but suddenly there was a focal point which united disparate groups of people who would otherwise never have converged to share their criticisms of the government.
Gezi was, fittingly, a quintessenti
al grassroots movement. No one expected it and no one could have predicted how it unfolded. In a few days, a mass of individuals with various concerns had achieved what the mainstream opposition parties had never managed in a decade: they had scared the government. They had massed from nowhere in their tens of thousands, and they were furious. Ordinary middle-class people, who could stay comfortable and safe in their homes if they wanted to, felt passionately enough about the movement to come back to an area they knew was far from safe, knowing they might end up in a prison cell or a hospital ward: not a decision to be taken lightly.
As I said, the protests were characterised by very Turkish traits of courage and determination. They were also full of stereotypes. In Taksim Square, the commune-like, carnival atmosphere was interspersed with typical Turkish opportunism. Amid the stands manned by public-spirited, smiling youths handing out food, water, books and anti-tear gas medicines to protesters, free of charge, there were the inevitable Turkish hawkers selling face masks, goggles, Turkish flags, Guy Fawkes masks and kebabs at considerable profit. For them, it was business as usual. The economy may have been looking bleak with a plunging stock market and depleted tourism, but the ubiquitous Turkish salesman was making a killing out of a protest movement which, ironically, had a significant anti-capitalism contingent.
Riot tourism emerged as a bizarre but totally logical by-product of the protests. One afternoon on my way home I came across a group of middle-aged American tourists staring wide-eyed at a wall of graffiti and taking photos of a barricade down the road. Their tour guide, a small man talking in authoritative tones, was translating the messages: ‘This one says no to fascism. This one says something very rude about the police I cannot repeat. If you look to your right, you can see a three-metre-high barricade. It is made of carnage.’
At the beginning of the protests, I was often hit by tear gas, which is like being burned by invisible acid all over your skin, and in your eyes and lungs. At the beginning, it is frightening because it disorients you, but after a few nights it becomes a very painful inconvenience, necessitating strategic retreats. A week into the protests, I was wheezily beating such a retreat when an elderly lady standing on her doorstep stopped me and offered me some lemon cologne, just as she would have done had I been a guest in her home. Automatically, I cupped my hands and thanked her as she sprinkled it over them and wished me better. As I splashed the cologne on my face and breathed it in, the tear gas cleared from my nostrils. This was pure Turkish magic: a traditional gesture of hospitality transformed into makeshift first aid as tear gas billowed around and young men and women shouted for their rights.
On 11 June, police retook the square and a few days later the park, suddenly and violently. Protesters were shocked, and the joyful atmosphere which had characterised the first stage of protests dissipated as people scattered. Now came the 1984 phase, when people near Taksim Square were stopped and searched by police for the helmets they carried to protect themselves from flying tear-gas canisters, when secret police mingled with the crowd and protesters looked at each other askance, when law-abiding citizens shut down their Facebook and Twitter accounts in panic. This was the period of dawn raids, when police tracked protesters down in their homes and university dormitories, when media channels were shut down for showing footage of the protests, when government officials denounced anyone in Taksim as a ‘terrorist’.
Any demonstration after this was stopped by police before it got within a kilometre of Taksim Square, so protesters refined their methods. In parks all over the country, people gathered in forums to discuss where to go next with their protest movement. Everyone was invited to speak in a scrupulously fair system which brought to mind the kind of perfect democracy invented by Athenians two and a half millennia ago. A specialised sign language emerged, so that the crowds could make their feelings heard without interrupting the speaker. This looked like a kind of semi-synchronised silent disco performance: a sea of shaking hands signified applause, crossed forearms meant ‘I don’t agree’ and revolving hands or a thunder of stamping feet encouraged the speaker not to waffle. It was an extraordinary thing to watch, the antithesis of the lazy boos of bored backbenchers in parliament, and emblematic of the immediacy of these forums. This was direct representation, and even if it could never be replicated in government, it was a wonderful sign of the purity of people’s intentions for a more honest and transparent democracy. Meanwhile, the protests continued, no longer every day, but an undercurrent of resistance to the government’s reactions continued to make itself felt.
There were many moments of high drama during the protests, to put it mildly. There was the time a rubber bullet skimmed my friend’s head as he sat in a café, the time I found another friend collapsed in a state of shock after a tear-gas attack, the time a policeman pointed a gun at me and told me not to move. Much worse, amateur footage showed police beating protesters viciously in side streets, away from news cameras, or throwing tear-gas canisters into the doorways of buildings where protesters had fled to supposed safety. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen the horrible moment when a policeman shot and killed Ethem Sarısülük in a sunny Ankara street, and many others watched Erdoğan’s televised speech in which he hailed police as ‘heroic’ and ‘restrained’.
What really stuck in my mind, however, were the unexpectedly beautiful moments of the protests. The day after police emptied Taksim Square without warning, a crowd of people gathered on the steps of Gezi Park towards midnight, and in place of the clamours and chants of previous days, the familiar notes of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ emerged eerily from a grand piano that was almost obscured by a rapt, silent audience. It was indescribably moving to see hundreds of frightened people calmed by a lone pianist, their solidarity rebuilt as they formed an audience for this spontaneous performance. Far off in the crowd, a figure was hunched over the keyboard, wearing red in honour of the Turkish flag and a jaunty fedora. No one knew his name. He played all through the night, and the next night, and then the next, in pouring rain. On Saturday, Gezi Park was raided and his piano was seized by police, but he had cheered everyone in the interim. By then, everyone knew that his name was Davide Martello and that he was an Italian-German musician who had come to Istanbul to support protesters with his ‘piano of peace’. He had reminded them that the world was watching.
Less sensational but no less heroic was the man who, a few days later, stood and stared at the poster of Atatürk on the AKM building in Taksim Square for eight hours. All he did was stand there silently, but somehow he commanded attention. As time passed, he drew the attention of plain-clothes police, who became increasingly confused and irritated by his stance. He said nothing to their questions, passively allowing himself to be searched and hassled. As dusk fell, he was gradually joined by a crowd of around three hundred people who came and stood with him in solidarity. At around two in the morning these people were dispersed and ten of them were arrested for ‘insisting on standing’. The protests were copied in other cities all over the country, and soon Erdem Gündüz was a national hero.
For weeks afterwards, there would always be a crowd of people standing in the square, facing Atatürk’s portrait or Gezi Park. Some of them had put tape over their mouths to symbolise the restrictions on freedom of speech, others read copies of 1984, and one girl went around giving people flowers. I stood there myself, and it was strangely relaxing. Standing still must be one of the most simple and powerful forms of protest. There is no need for noise, movement or anything that could possibly be construed as aggression: the protest movement had matured. And yet the line of police who stood facing these people looked very uncomfortable.
The image that reminds me most forcibly of the disparity between police and protesters was that of red carnations pressed against advancing water-cannon tanks. Hundreds of people had gathered in Taksim Square on 22 June to commemorate the (then) four fatalities of the protests. They had no banners, because people had realised by then that any vaguely political ele
ment to the protests (like banners or chants) gave the government reason to denounce them. There was no political element to this crowd at all, but hundreds of people had gathered, so police had to act. People offered up their commemorative carnations, and still the water cannon kept on rolling. It seemed like the more determined people were to demonstrate peacefully, the more determined police were to stop them.
Eskişehir is a student town near Ankara which was rocked by protests long after foreign cameras got bored with Istanbul. One of my favorite pieces of footage showed an old lady in a headscarf giving food to young protesters in the town centre. The old lady in the video speaks in a voice cracked by age. She is frail and stooped, and is clearly concerned about the safety of these young people, and whether they’re getting enough to eat. She reminded me very strongly of my Turkish grandmother, whose primary aim in life was to feed the young (mainly me). The young students respond to the old lady’s kindness by thanking her in Allah’s name and calling her ‘mother’. One young woman takes her hand, kisses it and touches it to her forehead in an age-old gesture of respect.
To me, this was a beautiful symbol of the humanity which crosses generations in this country. It showed the way young Turks respect and cherish the customs of their elders while fighting for a more modern Turkey, and the straightforward kindness of an old lady who might not have understood what all the fuss was about, but worried for the safety of whoever might be taking part. Religious and secular Turks are not so very different. At times like this, it is obvious how mutual respect and compassion exists outside the perimeters of political ideologies and institutionalised religion.