Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby Nordic » Mon Sep 24, 2012 2:18 am

Wow. Too bad our own False Flag attack resulting in a coup wasn't caught before it happened.

I like how this was over 300 people who conspired here. So much for that "gosh, so many people would have HAD to have been involved, how could they possibly keep that a secret?"

Well I suppose the answer in this case is that somebody didn't. But still.

BTW I'm having trouble finding an account of this story online that doesn't include the EXACT LANGUAGE:

The "Sledgehammer" conspiracy is alleged to have included plans to bomb historic mosques in Istanbul and trigger conflict with Greece to pave the way for an army takeover.


Talk about media consolidation.
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Sep 25, 2012 12:05 pm

There is now plenty of material on the Ergenekon coup online that is based on the documents.

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0& ... 40&bih=824
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 25, 2012 12:41 pm

Thanks for this thread, this is just....what a goldmine of shit to think about.

A secular Turkey really is important. Long term and short term. I can sympathize with the goals of these men -- certainly not their means, though.
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Sep 25, 2012 1:38 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Thanks for this thread, this is just....what a goldmine of shit to think about.

A secular Turkey really is important. Long term and short term. I can sympathize with the goals of these men -- certainly not their means, though.


Military rule is just a different opposite of secular.
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:12 pm

I know it...don't we already have a thread about the lesser of two evils?
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Sep 25, 2012 6:02 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:I know it...don't we already have a thread about the lesser of two evils?


It's hard to look at Turkey under the generals and Turkey under Welfare party and not choose the latter as the lesser evil. The generals have usually tended to fascism, they invaded Cyprus and their little revival plot here involved waging war on Greece. (What do you expect me to think as a most-of-the-time Greek?)
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Jun 03, 2013 11:58 am

I didn't see another thread on the current situation in Turkey so I thought it might be nice to bump this tangential one. If anyone disagrees this post can be moved.

I was at a busy design summit this week so I was removed from the 24-7 news cycle, however, I have a friend who was awarded a grant this year which he is using to study design movements in other countries and how design strategy and information theory is used to drive social change. I saw, via instagram, that he had been teargassed in Istanbul while I was at dinner with a German who was married to a Turk.

He explained how the beloved Gezi Park was under threat of being torn up and replaced by a mall, which the government admitted was fully economically-motivated. This served as a tipping point in the long-standing tension between the secular, left-leaning people and the "moderate" Islamic power structure.

http://defnesumanblogs.com/2013/06/01/w ... -istanbul/

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hot dissident:
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on edit: thanks for the heads up on that image, Barracuda.
Last edited by Luther Blissett on Mon Jun 03, 2013 4:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby barracuda » Mon Jun 03, 2013 12:39 pm



This image, which has been widely posted to demonstrate the size of protests currently going on, is actually an old image of the Intercontinental Istanbul Eurasia Marathon crossing the Bosphorus. See here.
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby KeenInsight » Mon Jun 03, 2013 7:42 pm

Nordic » 24 Sep 2012 00:18 wrote:
I like how this was over 300 people who conspired here. So much for that "gosh, so many people would have HAD to have been involved, how could they possibly keep that a secret?"



Indeed. Think about how easy it is for such things to become compartmentalized. This is the problem in America, where the civilian apparatus can not uproot the very deep dug-in roots of corruption and conspiracy.

Back when CIA agents started quitting that agency and telling people what the CIA was up to, they explained how "thrillseeking" it was to be told "not to say anything about this" even if it was absolutely, morally wrong. That's how you get people to shut up and go along with something, if you make them believe it was for some 'good' cause and betterment of whatever agenda is put forth with little accountability. Its like indoctrination on a whole different scale.
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby conniption » Tue Jun 04, 2013 2:28 am

Craig Murray

Talking Turkey

by craig on June 2, 2013

To simply say “protestors good, government bad” in Turkey is a symptom of the Blair delusion, that in civil conflicts there are guys with white hats and guys with black hats, and that the West’s role is to ride into town and kill the guys in the black hats. That is what “liberal intervention” means. The main aim of my second autobiographical book, “The Catholic Orangemen of Togo”, was to explain through the truth of the Sierra Leone experience how very, very wrong this is.

In fact civil conflicts are usually horribly complex, anent a variety of very bad people all trying to gain or retain power, none of them from an altruistic desire to make the world a better place. There may be ordinary people on the streets with that altruistic desire, being used and manipulated by these men; but it is not the ordinary altruistic people on the streets who ever come to power. Ever.

In Turkey the heavy crushing of a rainbow of protests in Istanbul has been going on for at least a month now. A week ago I was discussing it with my publisher, whose son lives in the city. A fortnight ago I was in Istanbul myself.

The Turkish people I was with were natural Erdogan supporters, and what struck me very forcibly was the fact that he has sickened many of his own natural allies by the rampant corruption in Turkey at present. Almost everyone I met spoke to me about corruption, and Turkey being Turkey, everyone seemed to know a very great deal of detail about how corruption was organised in various building and development projects and who was getting what. It therefore is hardly surprising that the spark which caused this conflict to flare to a new level was ignited by a corrupt deal to build a shopping centre on a park. The desecration of something lovely for money could be a metaphor for late Erdogan government.

The park is very small beer compared to the massive corruption involved in the appalling and megalomaniac Bosphorus canal project. Everyone talked to me about that one. The mainstream media, who never seem to know what is happening anywhere, seem to have missed that a major cause of the underlying unrest in Istanbul was the government’s announcement eight weeks ago that the Bosphorus canal is going ahead.

People are also incensed by the new proposal that would ban the sale of alcohol within 100 metres of any mosque or holy site, ie anywhere within central Istanbul. That would throw thousands of people out of work, damage the crucial tourist trade and is rightly seen as a symptom of reprehensible mounting religious intolerance that endangers Turkish society.

So there are plenty of legitimate reasons to protest, and the appalling crushing of protest is the best of them

But – and this is what it is never in the interest of Western politicians to understand – Government bad does not equal protestors good. A very high proportion – more than the British public realise by a very long way – of those protesting in the streets are off the scale far right nationalists of a kind that make the BNP look cuddly and Nigel Farage look like Tony Benn. Kemalism – the worship of Ataturk and a very unpleasant form of military dominated nationalism – remains very strong indeed in Istanbul. Ataturk has a very strong claim, ahead of Mussolini, to be viewed as the inventor of modern fascism

For every secular liberal in Istanbul there are two secular ultra-nationalist militarists. To westerners they stress the secular bit and try to hide the rest, and this works on the uncurious (being uncurious is a required attribute to get employed by the mainstream media). Of course there are decent, liberal, environmentalist protestors and the media will have no difficulty, now they have finally noticed something is happening, in filling our screens with beautiful young women who fit that description, to interview. But that is not all of what is going on here.

There certainly was no more freedom in Turkey before the AKP came to power. Government for decades had been either by the Kemalist military in dictatorship or occasionally by civilian governments they tolerated and controlled. People suddenly have short memories if they think protest was generally tolerated pre-Erdogan, and policy towards the Kurds was massively more vicious.

The military elite dominated society and through corruption they dominated commerce and the economy. The interests of a protected and generally fascist urban upper middle class were the only interests that counted at all. The slightest threat to those interests brought a military coup – again, and again, and again. Religion was barely tolerated, and they allied closely with Israel and the United States.

When Erdogan first came to power it was the best thing that had happened to Turkey for decades. The forgotten people of the Anatolian villages, and the lower middle class of the cities, had a voice and a position in the state for the first time. In individual towns and villages, the military and their clients who had exercised absolute authority had their power suddenly diminished. I witnessed this and it was a new dawn, and it felt joyous.

Then of course Erdogan gradually got sucked in to power, to money, to NATO, to the corruption of his Black Sea mafia and to arrogance. It all went very wrong, as it always seems to. That is where we are now.

Yes of course I want those pretty, genuinely liberal environmentalist girls in the park to take power. But they won’t. Look at the hard-eyed fascists behind them. Look at the western politicians licking their lips thinking about the chance to get a nice very right wing, anti-Muslim and pro-Israel government into power.

We should all be concerned at what is happening in Turkey. We should all call for an end to violent repression. But to wish the overthrow of a democratically elected government, and its replacement – by what exactly? – is a very, very foolish reaction.

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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby Jerky » Tue Jun 04, 2013 2:48 am

I wouldn't be so quick to be happy about the rise of Gullenism in the wake of all this.

Keep an open mind, folks. We might be getting played.

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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jun 04, 2013 10:08 am

Turkish PM Erdogan sees himself leading "Turkish Spring"

By Nick Tattersall

ISTANBUL, June 3 (Reuters) - If there is a "Turkish Spring" to rival the pro-democracy uprisings that swept the Middle East, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan believes that he, and not protesters in Istanbul, is leading it.

Erdogan has used his blustering, assertive style and a common touch that courts the conservative Islamic heartland to dominate Turkish politics like no leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern secular republic in 1923.

But four days of the fiercest anti-government protests for years have shocked even Erdogan loyalists, and raised questions over whether an authoritarian personal style now threatens democratic reforms from the early days of his decade in power. Opposition that has had little voice in an Erdogan-dominated parliament appears to be spilling now onto the streets.

Erdogan is the son of a poor sea captain hardened by a childhood in Istanbul's rough Kasimpasa district. A pious youth with soccer-playing ambitions, he was known wryly to allies as 'Imam Beckenbauer' - an allusion to German soccer star Franz Beckenbauer.

He talks bluntly, dismissing the protesters as "looters", and leaving confidently on Monday for a visit to North Africa.

The gatherings of demonstrators on Istanbul's Taksim Square have drawn loose comparisons with protests on Cairo's Tahrir Square that toppled Hosni Mubarak; but no, said Erdogan.

"Those in the foreign media who talk about a 'Turkish Spring', we are already going through a 'Turkish Spring', we have been living in it," he told reporters. "Those who want to turn it into winter will not succeed."

The reference was more than mere rhetoric.

"SERVANT OF THE NATION"

Erdogan sees his crowning achievement as taming anti-democratic forces that had long held Turkey back, in particular a staunchly secular army that intervened to topple governments four times in the second half of the 20th Century.

He has rooted out a "deep state" of hardline secularists ensconced in the security services, judiciary and civil service and resisting democratic reform.

Hundreds of military officers have been jailed on charges of plotting against Erdogan, while others including academics, journalists and politicians face trial on similar accusations.

Erdogan has shown political courage not only in confronting the generals but in seeking a peace deal with Kurdish rebels unthinkable before he was elected in 2002.


Opponents, however, see in his actions a ploy to stifle opposition and subvert the secular order, an accusation he denies.

They accuse him of infiltrating his own "deep state" of Islamist activists into key areas of the state bureaucracy and bridle over his campaign against alcohol sales and his opening of state institutions to the symbol of female Islamic piety, the heascarf so disdained by Ataturk.

With a tight grip on the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) he co-founded with President Abdullah Gul, Erdogan is not a leader who is used to being challenged, particularly in such a public and personal way, on the streets.

"If they call a person who is a servant of the nation a dictator, I can find nothing to tell them," he said on Sunday during the height of the unrest, with thinly concealed contempt. "I have no concern but to serve my 76 million citizens."

The four days of violence, in which riot police backed by armoured vehicles and helicopters fired tear gas and water cannon in Istanbul and Ankara, was triggered by government plans for a replica Ottoman-era barracks in Taksim Square, a characteristically grandiose project.

But it has widened into a broader show of defiance against Erdogan and the AKP, the party he created from an amalgamation of conservative religious forces, nationalists and centre-right elements. The opposition says only the prime minister himself can bring it to an end.

"The prime minister has to come out and apologise to the public," said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP).

The tragedy of the opposition is that it has as yet no credible leader to offer in Erdogan's place.

POLARIZING RHETORIC

Erdogan's AKP, the socially conservative successor to a banned Islamist party, has won three straight elections, each time with a higher share of the vote, and taken Turkey from crisis to Europe's fastest growing economy over the past decade.

That record has helped blunt misgivings over Erdogan's intolerance of dissent, both among the party faithful and Western allies, keen to see Turkey as a stable and successful Muslim democracy in a turbulent Middle East.

"A strong, stable Turkey is essential right now for the region. It is the key player. We hope this domestic issue is settled quickly," said one regional diplomat.

Such a narrative has for years kept the international spotlight off Erdogan's authoritarian tendencies, allowing him to govern by force of personality, cementing a pro-government majority which leaves him with little need to seek consensus.

He is a fighter on the political field as he was on the soccer pitch.

"If this is about holding meetings, if this is a social movement, where they gather 20, I will get up and gather 200,000 people. Where they gather 100,000, I will bring together one million," he said of the protests.

Such fiery rhetoric does little to suggest he might have been chastened by events. He is a man tempered by having served time in prison himself in the 1990s for publicly reciting a poem deemed to promote political Islam.

"I think what we've seen is more of the traditional Erdogan," said Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the Istanbul Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, EDAM.

"The reason he remains defiant despite having every reason to appease the situation is that this policy of polarization, of eliminating the middle ground, has served him well in the past and he believes it will continue to do so."

It also sets him at odds with President Gul, who has taken a more conciliatory tone.

In Kasimpasa, the working-class neighbourhood where Erdogan studied the Koran and played football as a boy, he still enjoys a strong following; but even loyal supporters acknowledge their patience with his authoritarian style is wearing thin.

"The demonstrators have sown the seeds of discontent. They've planted the seeds of Libya, Iraq, Syria and Egypt," said a school bus driver who gave his name as Habip.

"The prime minister had an opportunity to calms things down. He should have been conciliatory, but no. He handed politics to the hands of 14- and 15-year olds. His divisive speech grinds and sharpens the knife dividing our society." (Additional reporting by Can Sezer and Ayla Jean Yackley; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Giles Elgood)
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jun 04, 2013 10:22 am

"We" are not being played. Whether some new motherfucker comes to power due to the situation, it doesn't leave any doubt who is in the right. Istanbul is in the streets because of a plan to raze the only park left in the city center and put up a mall and hotels for as-yet anonymous capitalist motherfuckers; and because instead of responding to democracy and reason, the state is beating, gassing, arresting and often enough killing people in the street. The Erdogan government strayed from secular assurances and made a bad-news turn to banning alcohol and espousing dress codes. In its use of force it is looking like all of the past Turkish hardline governments. In the background you have the usual rabid neoliberal economic policies, precarity and poverty. This is now an uprising of the people. It didn't happen because of anyone's plot. It is happening because power tends to absolutism, both in its use of force and its stupidity.

Also, unfortunately, in its ability to plot.

This is probably the first event on this scale in years not to spawn a long RI thread. Alice is gone. I'd have started it but instead I've posted 30 items on it on my "Timeline," met a bunch of new people and involved myself in organizing a joint Turkey-Greece solidarity event next Saturday at OWS in Zuccotti.

https://www.facebook.com/events/200301413453024
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby beeline » Tue Jun 04, 2013 10:41 am

Yeah, I had to do the unthinkable, actually reach out to an old friend that is Turkish and ask her what's going on! She gave me a brief explanation and sent me this link:


http://collettivoprezzemolo.blogspot.it/2013/06/in-solidarity-with-protestors-in-turkey_1.html

The conviction that Turkey is a success story of economic growth and democratization holds on a number of assumptions. It reduces economic prosperity to the numerical increase in the GDP while ignoring social injustice, income inequality, precarious employment, labor fatalities and so forth. It reads stable democracy as commitment to consecutive elections, absence of military coups, and majoritarian rule, while turning blind eye to the human rights violations, minorities and political repression. Indeed, Turkey is a "success" story of environmental degradation to create sites of construction and profiteering, of cultural and historical destruction to build hundreds of fortresses of mass consumption. It is also a "success" story of police growth and paramilitarization, of suppression of activists,
journalists, academicians and artists.
The ongoing events in Istanbul very well portray this success story.

Police brutality against peaceful protesters reached extreme levels in Istanbul.
For several days, a group of Istanbulite people occupied Taksim Gezi Park to resist against its demolition. A while ago, the AKP government decided, without negotiating with the people of Istanbul, to run a project for the reconstruction of the Taksim Square, the most central location of the city. The project included the demolition of the Gezi Park, and its replacement with a shopping mall based on the replication of an old military barracks (Topçu Kışlası) which used to exist there, until early 1940s. For the last two days, the riot police cracked down before the sunrise on peaceful protesters who were camping on the Gezi Park. The police destroyed their tents and set them on fire.

On Friday morning, the riot police surrounded the entire Gezi Park and blocked it to the protesters’ access. Since then, thousands of fellow Istanbulites came to Taksim Square to support the resistance. Yet, the Turkish police embarked on warfare against peaceful demonstrators with excessive use of gas bombs and water cannons. Violent police repression injured more than 100 people, many of them needed to be hospitalized. Social media accounts claim that ambulances were not allowed to enter the square, while several injured people were asking for help. Doctors were called to provide voluntary assistance, and mobile clinics were set up. The whole day, the police did not stop firing tear gas and terrorized Taksim Square and the entire neighborhood.

Despite ongoing police brutality, the number of protesters increased and many fellow Istanbulites, mostly organized through social media, continued to arrive to Occupy Taksim Gezi Park. In the evening, the riot police blocked the entrance to the square. They encountered thousands of protesters rallying through the Istiklal Street. It is reported that mobile networks were blocked and security cameras were turned off to prevent the streaming of the incidences. For hours, the riot police kept shooting gas bombs and pressured water against the protesters from behind their barricades. At midnight, they violently started crushing on the gathering on the Istiklal Street. Still, many people resist and they are making calls for a bigger demonstration on Saturday.

The ongoing protests in Istanbul are not simply about the removal of some trees on the Gezi Park. They are about a particular logic of government. It is a logic that authoritatively and violently imposes destructive and profit-making policies irrespective of the people, their cities, their history and their environment.

We, the Collettivo Prezzemolo, express our solidarity with our comrades resisting yet against another authoritarian government/system among others in Europe and the world, where anything, including murdering people and destroying environment, can be done for the sake of guaranteeing the profits of a handful of bosses, CEO's and banks. We share their dreams of a town, a city, a world that is organized and built more democratically, according to the needs of a society freed from neo-liberal impositions of uniform ways of living, producing and consuming through violence and suppression.
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Re: Turkey: Ergenekon Coup Plan Details

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Jun 04, 2013 5:23 pm

This directly contradicts what I relayed in my first post with regards to the secular vs. Islamic right, but that's good. (Many links at original.)

The Right to the City Movement and the Turkish Summer

As I write this, Istanbul is under siege. The might of Istanbul's entire police force—the largest city police force in Europe—is violently cracking down on peaceful occupiers in Gezi Park.

The protest, which began on 27 May, is ostensibly over a planned shopping center to be built over a park in Istanbul's central Taksim Square. Nevertheless, massive popular movements like this do not emerge out of nowhere. Typically, they are the result of the tireless groundwork of activists over the course of an extended period. And then, something happens: a spark sets off the lighter fluid accumulating unnoticed at everyone's feet.

The protests began with approximately seventy Right to the City protesters in Gezi Park on 27 May when demolition of the park was set to begin. These activists successfully stopped demolition and a little more than a dozen activists spent that night in the park. They erected two large tents, brought guitars, and made their opinions known to passersby. These activists were comprised of members of Taksim Solidarity and the Taksim Gezi Park Protection and Beautification Association as well as some unaffiliated but concerned individuals.

On 28 May, a coalition of Right to the City associations presented a petition to Istanbul's Council to Protect Culture Heritage calling on it protect the park. At 1:30 in the afternoon on 28 May, bulldozers returned a second time. The protesters resisted and police used tear gas to clear the park. One activist climbed a tree and was unable to be dislodged, further stalling demolition. Demolition resumed and continued until pro-Kurdish rights Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and secularist opposition Republican People's Party Members of Parliament Sırrı Süreyya Önder and Gülseren Onanç blockaded bulldozers. This yet again stopped demolition and a protest was called for 7pm that night. Protesters slept in the park again.

The day of 29 May was more low-key as a few hundred people came out for protests in the park and created a festival-like atmosphere with films and concerts. Throughout the day, activists planted seedlings in the park as a token of resistance. Numbers swelled and 150 people slept in the park that night as the state regrouped.

On 30 May Turkish police, unwilling to allow a major tourist hub to be blighted in this fashion, gave the occupiers a five in the morning wake-up call in the form of tear gas. In case the message was not clear enough, they also set fire to occupiers' tents. With the park cleared and the state clear that it meant business, demolition resumed until at 7:50 in the morning, Önder yet again blockaded the bulldozers with his own body. After news broke on social media of the early-morning raid and concomitant police violence, people accumulated throughout the day and slept over in the park en masse.

The police tried the same tactics on the morning of 31 May, this time with several hundred people sleeping over in the park. The raid was more vicious than the day before and media was banned from the park. After this, Taksim Square officially became contested territory as police violence escalated and protesters clashed with police throughout the day.

In the ensuing mayhem, famed freelance Turkish journalist, Ahmet Şık was hospitalized after being struck in the head by a teargas canister. Onlookers claimed that Şık, who in 2011 penned a book about police corruption in Turkey that was banned from publication, was fired on intentionally from a distance of about ten yards. Önder himself was hospitalized after also being hit by a tear gas canister.

What likely would have blown over with no lasting impact suddenly ignited into one of the biggest mobilizations in recent Turkish history. Estimates during the day of 31 May put the number of protesters between five thousand and ten thousand, and police have attempted mass arrests of anyone occupying the park. Police forces have been making liberal use of teargas, resulting in a flood of instantly iconic images that capture the spirit of dissent. There are in fact reports that the police have used so much tear gas that Istanbul's police force has had to ship in more from the nearby city of Bursa. On Friday, #DirenGeziParki [Resist Gezi Park] was, for most of the day, the number one worldwide trending hashtag on Twitter.

Late in the night on 31 May, the police barricaded the park and closed all of the roads and public transportation leading to Taksim Square. This completed the square's transformation into a battleground as protesters attempted—and in some instance succeeded—to break the barricades. With news spreading that Taksim was barricaded, and growing outrage at the media blackout, residents of Istanbul began organizing in their own neighborhoods and marching together to Taksim. Unverified reports on Twitter estimated 40,000 people were on foot heading to Taksim, including thousands crossing the Bosphorus Bridge that connects the European and Asian sides of the city, which is normally closed to pedestrians.

Solidarity protests have spread organically to other cities, mostly as an expression of anger at police brutality. Protesters have taken to the streets in the cities of Ankara, Izmir, Izmit, Eskişehir, Kayseri, Antalya, Kutahya, and no doubt others. Radikal reports that protesters were tear gassed in Izmit and Eskişehir and dozens were detained in other cities. At the time of writing, it appears that numbers are only going to continue to grow and demonstrations will continue to escalate.

The police violence has been nothing short of excessive. According to the Turkish alternative news site Bianet, at least one hundred protesters have been injured. But this was reported during the day on 31 May and so seems like a conservative estimate at this point, especially given the level of violence and the use of tear gas, which is widely considered a chemical weapon. The Turkish Radikal daily has a series of videos available putting police violence on display. According to a live blog on the leftist website Sendika.org, police have in multiple instances blocked ambulances from accessing the injured.

The reaction of the police prompted Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch, to declare Friday that "the display of extreme police violence yet again against peaceful demonstrators in the Taksim Park spells the government and local authorities' deep intolerance of the right to assembly and non-violent protest in Turkey today."

The Origins of the Uprising

The fact that the protests were not sponsored by a political party or related to the Kurdish conflict has led to comparisons with Occupy Wall Street (OWS) or even the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of 1999. OWS protesters in the United States, once inspired by tactics of the Arab uprisings, are now expressing solidarity with Turkish activists. Right now no party or group can claim ownership of the movement and the only sign of coalition is the information hub, DirenGeziParki.com.

But this protest is the latest manifestation of a movement that has been stirring for some time now. The shopping mall is only one component of a plan to entirely redesign Taksim Square into a more car-friendly, tourist-accommodating, and sanitized urban center. Mass protests have also taken place recently to stop the closure of the landmark Emek Cinema, located on İstiklal Avenue off Taksim Square, which is also being converted into (no surprise) a shopping mall.

Taksim Square is the heart and soul of Istanbul. It is common sense to Istanbulites that if a revolution is to come to Turkey, it would begin in Taksim. Protests are regularly held in the square, and issues run the full gamut of concerns of Turkish citizens: LGBT equality, recognition of the Armenian Genocide, an end to the Kurdish conflict, an end to military conscription, economic justice, and more. In 2011, there was a massive one-day protest in support of a free and open internet that drew upwards of thirty thousand people.

[Protesters flood Taksim Square for the "Internetime Doukunma" ("Don't Touch My Internet") protest in 2011. Gezi Park can be seen in the background. Photo by Jay Cassano.]

Taksim is also home to a massive May Day protest every year, in part a response to the Taksim Square Massacre on May Day 1977. On 1 May, Istanbul police violently cracked down on protesters, using over fourteen tons of water mixed with tear gas. As evidence of the link between current protests and those of May Day, the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions (also known by the acronym DISK, and one of the largest union blocks in Turkey) officially called on its members to come out and support the occupation.

The new Taksim will eliminate mass pedestrian entrances from all sides in favor of car tunnels, making it an impractical site to protest and congregate. In short, it will be reduced to a photo-op for tourists who pass through for five minutes and then continue on with their tax-free shopping.

Another key launching point was the planned construction of a third bridge crossing over the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Ground broke on construction of the third bridge on the first day of the protest and was one of the main concerns expressed by protesters, even though they were occupying Gezi Park and not the bridge construction site. If built, the third bridge is expected to complete Istanbul's deforestation by subjecting the northern Belgrade Forest to development. The third bridge is another example of the AKP's development-driven, car-oriented designs for Istanbul, with complete disregard for the viability of the city in ecological and social terms. These concerns were highlighted in a recent feature-length documentary, Ecumenopolis: City Without Limits, which sold out theaters in Taksim's İstiklal Avenue when it opened.

Culture Wars or Economic Unrest?

The entire plan for Taksim Square’s redesign is part of an overall neoliberal turn that Prime Minister Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) are central to. Istanbul's city center has been undergoing a rapid process of gentrification, especially in the historic neighborhoods of Sulukule, Tarlabaşı, Tophane, and Fener-Balat, which housed the poor, the immigrants, the Kurds, and the Roma. The goal of this so-called “urban renewal” is to make room for more tourist attractions, or to—at minimum—“clean up” the neighborhoods, removing working class urban dwellers who might scare off tourists. The idea is that this new and improved city center will attract foreign investment in Istanbul, which is to be further developed into a financial and cultural hub at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

Some outlets have linked the Gezi Park protests to the AKP's recent restrictions on the sale of alcohol. Journalists doing so are attempting to portray the Gezi Park occupation as a conflict between Erdoğan's Islamism and the country's secular ethos. The secularist opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has also taken this stance, and has tried to coopt the uprising by turning the movement into a symbol of culture wars between a secular youth and an older Islamist generation. Attractive as that framing may be to Western media, it could not be further from the truth. While many protesters are without a doubt staunch secularists who are motivated by opposition to the AKP's increasing social conservatism, there is no indication that this is what ultimately brought thousands of people out into the streets. In fact, when CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, came to Gezi Park to speak, protesters sang over him, preventing him from being heard. It is clear that the movement thus far is about a conflict in visions for urban space between ruling elites and the people who actually live, work, and play in the city. In this regard it is telling that #DirenGeziParkı emerged as the original hashtag on Twitter. This connects to protests held in 2009 in Istanbul against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which took place under the banner of “Diren Istanbul”—“Resist Istanbul”—cleverly shortened in translation to “ResIstanbul.”

At the same time, and as the protests appear to spread and take on a more generally anti-government tone, it is not unlikely that general dissatisfaction with Erdoğan will eventually win out as the primary message of the movement. In that case, we can expect to see a rift between the liberal secularist opposition who joined the protest on 31 May and after and the radical protesters who spawned the movement in the first place.

Throughout the Arab uprisings, Turkey remained ostensibly stable. Some commentators proposed Turkey as a model for post-uprising Arab states, most especially Egypt. The mixture of a “moderate” Islamist prime minister and a "secular" constitution made NATO-member Turkey an attractive prototype for a new Middle East in the eyes of Western pundits. Others, along with myself, have pointed out that Turkey is a poor choice of role model, given its ongoing conflict with its Kurdish minority population as well as myriad other dynamics.

Today, it seems as though Turkey's internal divisions are surfacing in a way not seen for some time. What we are seeing in the Gezi Park occupation is the sudden explosion of this Right to the City movement, with some general anti-government sentiment mixed in. For now, an Istanbul court has temporarily suspended construction of the park, pending a hearing on the matter. As time goes on, and if this movement continues to grow, rifts are likely to occur and the meaning of the protests will become as contested as the physical space of Taksim Square. But for the time being, between the massive May Day protest and now this nationwide movement less than a month later, we may finally be in for a summer of uprising in Turkey.

[Cihan Tekay contributed research to this story.]
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
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