The Open Magazine
July 13, 2013
In Turkey, Silence Speaks
by Nazes Afroz
Once, a man, the mayor of a city, recited a poem in public praising
his religion. That man was arrested because the law of the land
interpreted his reading of the poem as religious incitement and
hatred. A semi-professional soccer player turned politician, the man
spent four months in prison.
Four years later, he led his party to a landslide victory in the
country’s election. He could not become the leader of the country
immediately as the old laws still barred him from assuming any public
office because of his earlier conviction. The following year,
lawmakers of his party changed the rules for him to become prime
minister.
Now the same man, as prime minister, is faced with a major crisis.
Citizens of his country are standing in silence out in the streets to
protest his intolerant and brash ways of governance. In response,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan is sending his police force
to arrest the protestors who dare challenge his authority.
The protests were sparked by the proposed development of Taksim
Square, the only green space in that part of Istanbul, Turkey’s
biggest, most vibrant city. The government planned to destroy it and
replace it with a shopping mall. Locals protested by camping in the
park and attempting to stop bulldozers coming in to uproot trees.
Calling the protestors ‘anti-development’, the government sent in a
large police contingent armed with tear gas, pepper spray, water
cannons and batons. The protestors stayed put.
The local media, either out of loyalty to the government or fear of
persecution, chose not to report the high-handed police action on
unarmed civilians; CNN Turk broadcast a documentary on penguins while
the police action was taking place. But social media was abuzz with
reports, photos and videos of the excessive use of force by the
police. And like a torrent, sympathisers from all walks of life
started pouring into Taksim Square to stand against the government’s
actions.
“How can he say this?” a young Turkish friend of mine screamed as
Prime Minister Erdoan was delivering a televised speech, threatening
the protestors. The gist of what he said is: “I’ve decided, and I’ll
build this shopping mall in spite of all your protests.” My friend was
livid and loud: “Isn’t that the language of a dictator?” While
translating every line of the speech for me, she vented her anger at
the arrogance of the leader of her country.
This friend of mine, in her late twenties, is steeped in the ideas of
civil rights and personal choice that go with being a citizen of a
modern society. There are tens of thousands of young Turks like her
who are vocal, articulate and well aware of their rights. They are the
ones who first swarmed into the streets and were then joined by an
unprecedented number of citizens from everywhere in the city. Tens of
thousands of residents from the Asian side of the city came marching
over the massive Bosphorus Bridge in solidarity with the Taksim
protestors. Artists, musicians and performers came round to add a
carnival feel to the protests. Housewives banged pots and pans from
their rooftops and balconies to register their disapproval of police
action.
Taksim Square is perhaps the most interesting and vibrant space in
Istanbul, dotted with hotels, cafes and restaurants. The residents and
businesses around Taksim not only extended moral support, they opened
their doors to protestors fleeing the tear gas and pepper spray, and
let doctors and medics use their lounges as makeshift medical rooms.
While this wave of sympathy and active support was being watched by
the world, the prime minister, in his usual aggressive manner, was
saying he too could rally his supporters to prove he had a mandate to
implement the project.
Within days, ripples of the Taksim protest reached the capital Ankara
and other major cities like Izmer and Antalya.
Professionals, trade unions, teachers, students and housewives came
out in droves to protest against the government. For the first time,
the government relented and withdrew the police from Taksim-only to
send the force back after a couple of weeks to clear the square.
The ‘moderate Islamist’ AK Party led by Prime Minister Erdoan has been
in power for a little over a decade. It has won three consecutive
elections; another is due next year. During this past decade, Turkey
has registered impressive growth. Massive infrastructure projects have
been undertaken and many have been completed. Its per capita income
has risen significantly. So what explains the anger against the
government?
Following the demise of the old Ottoman Empire during World War I,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey in the 1920s by expelling
occupying European powers. Secular democracy became the cornerstone of
the new constitution. The constitution ensured total separation of
Islam and the State in a Muslim majority country. In his project of
modernising Turkey, Ataturk had the full support of a well-formed
military, which continued to retain huge influence in the country in
the decades after. The powerful military became the self-appointed
keeper of the secular constitution and continued to interfere in the
country’s democratic process, carrying out four coups between 1960 and
1997. That was a period of great repression, with no voices of dissent
allowed. Various centrist secular parties often worked hand-in-glove
with the military-they were the ones who jailed Erdoan for reciting
the poem praising the ‘sword of Islam’.
These regimes created a vacuum. Erdoan, an able administrator with
ambition, filled the void by bringing together Islamist parties of
various shades together to form the AK Party in 2001, and swept the
2002 election.
Erdoan’s model of development is clearly based on a free market
economy and private enterprise, yet he and his party also harbour
ambitions of turning Turkey into a socially conservative society. As a
Muslim majority country with a secular democratic foundation, Turkey
has always been an interesting case study compared to other Muslim
states that have endured deep conservatism and dictatorships. But in
the last decade, a project of Islamisation has progressed under the
aegis of the AK Party.
One week before the police crackdown on Taksim, the government issued
new restrictions on the sale of alcohol. A bill seeking to declare
abortion illegal is in parliament. Restrictions are also being brought
in to limit physical closeness between men and women in public.
Erdoan is said to see himself as a restorer of the old glories of the
Islamic Ottoman Empire, an idea that alarms Turkey’s secular citizens.
He wants to rebuild the old Ottoman military barracks in Taksim by
demolishing a cultural centre named after Ataturk. He has also named
the new third bridge over the Bosphorus channel after the Ottoman
Emperor Salim said to have inflicted gross atrocities on such minority
groups as Alevis.
Even though Erdoan has benefitted from the system of secular
democracy, he has not shied away from using the most draconian
terrorism laws put in place by previous regimes to gag any voice of
dissent. It is said that Turkey is Europe’s biggest prison for
journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, close
to 400 journalists are in prison-many of them minority Kurds. The
publisher Ragep Zarakolou, my friend, has lost count of how many times
he has been to prison for publishing books on the Armenian genocide or
Kurdish issues that are taboo subjects in Turkey.
Educated urban Turkish youth like my friend are connected with the
outside world and have a developed sense of personal choice and civil
rights. They do not want the State or prime minister to decide how
they live their lives. They have posed a huge challenge to Erdoan, and
he is yet to grasp the causes of their resentment. Hence, he is still
talking tough. He and his party leaders are spitting venom against
social media avenues, and threatening to shut them down. He thinks his
constituency-the rural poor-will keep him in power. But 15 million of
Turkey’s population of 80 million live in Istanbul. So events in the
city are bound to have a ripple effect on the rest of the country.
Another important shift Erdoan has failed to notice is that educated
urban Turks have crossed their old line of fear. After police flushed
protestors out of Taksim with tear gas and water cannons, renowned
performance artist Erdem Gunduz began a standing man protest. What
began as a lone man standing silently, is now an iconic countrywide
movement, piling ever more pressure on the man who once went to prison
for reciting a poem in public.