STILL STANDING
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
June 27, 2013 Thursday
First Edition
by Anthony Ham – Additional reporting by William Gourlay in Istanbul.
Anthony Ham is a Melbourne-based journalist.
With their silent protests, activists in Turkey may be quieter,
but their discontent remains. Anthony Ham reports.
When Murat Yavas first learnt of the protests that have rocked Istanbul
for almost a month, he thought little of it. He supported the aim of
the protesters to protect Gezi Park, one of the last expanses of green
space in downtown Istanbul, and hoped the government would relent on
its plans to transform the park into a shopping mall.
“First it was about Gezi Park,” he told Fairfax Media, speaking close
to Taksim Square, the epicentre of the protests. “Even New York has
a large park, Central Park. In Istanbul there is no green space.”
Even so, like most Turks he was content to watch from a distance.
Yavas was a supporter of the government and had voted for Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the past. “Before in Istanbul there
were many problems. When he came, he solved the problems, so we gave
him our vote.”
But for Yavas, a university-educated son of a policeman, and indeed
for Turkey, everything changed on the night of May 31 when police
attacked the sleeping protesters with tear gas.
“It started with a couple of trees, just a few university students.
But the police came at 5am. This was the spark.”
Overnight, a relatively small environmental protest against an
ill-conceived development project became a platform for the growing
discontent of a nation. The target of their wrath was the most popular
leader Turkey has known in a century, a leader who appeared to have
forgotten that his power came from the people.
TAKSIM Square is the chaotic heartbeat of modern Istanbul. Before the
protests began, Taksim was a polluted and unruly clamour of incessant
traffic and noise. As an iconic open space, it was more Times Square
than Tahrir, the vast square where Egypt’s revolution was born.
However, as a stage for Turkey’s complicated mix of countercultures,
Taksim has history. In the 19th century, it was here that poor
immigrants to the city first settled. Taksim also sits atop the ruins
of an Armenian cemetery that was destroyed in 1939; its gravestones
were used to build stairs in neighbouring Gezi Park. In the 1980s,
it was the unofficial centre for Istanbul’s gay and lesbian community.
“Taksim is where everybody expresses freely their happiness, sorrow,
their political and social views,” Esin, 41, wearing a headscarf,
told The New York Times at the height of the protests.
Taksim also lays bare what many consider to be the defining fault
line of Turkish society. At one end of the square is a mosque. At the
other, draped in Turkish flags, stands a giant portrait of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey’s secular political state.
It was Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, who set about
dragging the country into the 20th century. As part of his modernising
drive, he preached the virtues of secular democracy and mandated the
use of Latin script, European dress and greater equality for women.
For almost a century, it was Ataturk’s vision that prevailed and
whenever Islam strayed into the political realm, the Turkish military
stepped in to secure his secular legacy.
By turn of the 21st century, however, Turkey was in crisis. Its
political class was in disarray and its economy was in free fall. Into
the breach stepped Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul
and leader of the nominally Islamist Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi
(Justice and Development Party, or AKP). Erdogan and his AKP won in
a landslide in 2002, increased its majority in 2007, and did so again
in 2011.
Despite Erdogan’s Islamist leanings, the Turkish military remained
on the sidelines. That they have done so owes much to Erdogan’s
popularity – to move against the AKP would have been deeply unpopular.
But Erdogan’s longevity also derives from his skilful negotiation
of the country’s secular-religious divide. Erdogan and his AKP have
never sought to introduce sharia law. Nor have they pushed the more
extremist elements of Islamist philosophy.
Instead, his government built its popularity around an inclusive
coalition that attracted pious and liberal Muslims alike without
threatening the secular foundations of the Turkish state. To stay
on the right side of the law, Erdogan even abandoned Islamism as the
party’s official philosophy for one of “conservative democracy”.
This combination of wily political ways, an appeal to voters across
a broad cross-section of Turkish society and a cleverly constructed
version of political Islam-lite all helped to transform Erdogan into
the most effective Turkish leader since Ataturk.
And then something happened. Over time, unfettered by effective
political opposition and having cowed the mainstream Turkish media
into submission, Erdogan lost his calm authority and began to display
an authoritarian streak. At first, he bulldozed through a series of
signature development projects – a bridge whose name celebrates an
Ottoman-era general who once massacred minorities, a new mosque that
commandeered a park – each of which has eaten away at the city’s green
and open spaces and alienated important sectors of Turkish society.
Then, little by little, he began to push an increasingly conservative
Islamist agenda: he banned the sale of alcohol after 10pm and even
berated couples for kissing on public transport.
Once it would have been the military who stepped in to curb Erdogan’s
excesses. This time it was the Turkish people who took matters into
their own hands.
IF THERE is an Islamist-secular divide in Turkey, it would appear
to owe more to the posturing of politicians than to any meaningful
popular division at large in the nation.
It was Ataturk who made secularism the philosophy of power, thereby
relegating Islam to the margins of opposition. This neat dichotomy
worked first in building, and later safeguarding state institutions
that have held firm for almost a century.
But by effectively criminalising political Islam in a country
where more than 99 per cent of the population is Muslim, Ataturk
disenfranchised an important sector of Turkish society.
Under Erdogan, the roles have been reversed and Islam has become the
language of power, while it has been the turn of secularists to be
consigned to the margins.
Against this backdrop, what gave the Taksim protests their power
was the fact that these two fundamental strands of Turkish society
finally came together on the same side. For the first time anyone
could remember, Muslim activists stood shoulder to shoulder with
diehard secular loyalists.
“We are Muslim, but we don’t want religion to dominate our lives,”
Asya Balik, 32, an environmental engineer and protester, tells Fairfax
Media. Like so many protesters, this mother of two was an Erdogan
supporter until the government cracked down on the protesters. Now
her smartphone is filled with images of police storming the barricades
and unarmed protesters being tear-gassed.
“The problem is his attitude,” she says. “He is very arrogant. He just
decides things, without any discussion or negotiation. He thinks they
are the government, they have power. He is behaving like a kabadayi
[stand-over man]. He thinks he is the sultan.”
“We are at a crossroads,” says Murat Yavas. “We are stopped between
democracy or theocracy, but now we are heading towards theocracy.”
It is an exaggeration perhaps, but one that Erdogan himself has done
little in recent times to discredit. At the height of the protests,
Erdogan claimed that protesters had been seen drinking alcohol in a
mosque. His claims backfired when the mosque’s imam countered that
the protesters were simply seeking shelter.
His promise to replace the controversial shopping mall planned for
Gezi Park with a mosque was similarly condemned as a ploy to use Islam
for his own political ends. And in a damaging public embarrassment
for Erdogan, a group of conservative Islamic “wise men” published an
open letter in the online T24 newspaper. In the letter they condemned
the government crackdown and described the protests as “legitimate”.
Just as worrying for Erdogan, a significant sector of Turkish society
which once voted for him is no longer listening. While he was blaming
foreign media and foreign agitators for the protests, Turks all over
the country were switching off state television and seeking other
sources of news.
And when he described Twitter and other social media as “the worst
menace to society”, his statement only fanned the flames of opposition.
According to one Turkish newspaper, Turkish Twitter users have soared
from 1.8 million at the end of May to nearly 10 million less than a
month later. For the first time in modern Turkish history, Islamists
and secularists were talking the same language and there was very
little that the politicians could do about it.
FOR ALL Erdogan’s troubles, his position as Prime Minister appears
unassailable, at least for now. Erdogan’s political capital prior
to the protests was considerable and although opinion polls show an
erosion of support, a majority still back Turkey’s embattled leader.
Under Erdogan’s watch, Turkey’s economy has made a robust recovery:
the country’s GDP has increased fourfold since he came to power. He
has also made significant progress in resolving Turkey’s long-running
conflict with its Kurdish minority, has maintained a push for Turkish
membership of the EU and has begun the process of overhauling the
country’s antiquated constitution.
“He may seem like he has been coming down on people hard these past
few weeks,” one retired school teacher told The New York Times at a
pro-Erdogan rally last week. “‘But what do you expect when everything
he has built for us over 10 years is torn apart and counts for zero?
Anyone would be angry and act in this way.”
Where the protests have left their mark, however, is in their
rewriting of the ground rules of Turkish politics. In doing so,
they have sidelined existing opposition parties and have denied
the government’s attempts to paint this as a war between Islam and
its enemies. The result is a new political space, a new politics of
previously unimaginable coalitions in Turkish society.
Whether that translates into a meaningful political force that can
challenge the AKP in municipal elections next year, and in national
elections scheduled for 2015, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, amid the ongoing traffic and political unrest of
Taksim, a new form of protest has taken hold. It began when a solitary
protester, Erdem Gunduz, stood in the square and gazed up at the
Turkish flag and the image of Ataturk. He did so for hour after hour.
Surrounded by Taksim’s perpetual movement, few noticed him at first.
But news of the silent, standing protester soon spread across the
city and he was joined by others who have become known as duran adam
– the standing ones. Old men carrying prayer beads and young women
in headscarves now stand alongside students, unionists and liberal
intellectuals. No longer afraid, no longer separated by the old rules,
they stand together in silence, turning their backs on those who
would divide them.
Content-Type: MESSAGE/RFC822; CHARSET=US-ASCII
Content-Description:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
From: Katia Peltekian
Subject: Still Standing
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
June 27, 2013 Thursday
First Edition
STILL STANDING
by Anthony Ham – Additional reporting by William Gourlay in Istanbul.
Anthony Ham is a Melbourne-based journalist.
With their silent protests, activists in Turkey may be quieter, but
their discontent remains. Anthony Ham reports.
When Murat Yavas first learnt of the protests that have rocked
Istanbul for almost a month, he thought little of it. He supported the
aim of the protesters to protect Gezi Park, one of the last expanses
of green space in downtown Istanbul, and hoped the government would
relent on its plans to transform the park into a shopping mall.
“First it was about Gezi Park,” he told Fairfax Media, speaking close
to Taksim Square, the epicentre of the protests. “Even New York has a
large park, Central Park. In Istanbul there is no green space.”
Even so, like most Turks he was content to watch from a distance.
Yavas was a supporter of the government and had voted for Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the past. “Before in Istanbul there
were many problems. When he came, he solved the problems, so we gave
him our vote.”
But for Yavas, a university-educated son of a policeman, and indeed
for Turkey, everything changed on the night of May 31 when police
attacked the sleeping protesters with tear gas.
“It started with a couple of trees, just a few university students.
But the police came at 5am. This was the spark.”
Overnight, a relatively small environmental protest against an
ill-conceived development project became a platform for the growing
discontent of a nation. The target of their wrath was the most popular
leader Turkey has known in a century, a leader who appeared to have
forgotten that his power came from the people.
TAKSIM Square is the chaotic heartbeat of modern Istanbul. Before the
protests began, Taksim was a polluted and unruly clamour of incessant
traffic and noise. As an iconic open space, it was more Times Square
than Tahrir, the vast square where Egypt’s revolution was born.
However, as a stage for Turkey’s complicated mix of countercultures,
Taksim has history. In the 19th century, it was here that poor
immigrants to the city first settled. Taksim also sits atop the ruins
of an Armenian cemetery that was destroyed in 1939; its gravestones
were used to build stairs in neighbouring Gezi Park. In the 1980s, it
was the unofficial centre for Istanbul’s gay and lesbian community.
“Taksim is where everybody expresses freely their happiness, sorrow,
their political and social views,” Esin, 41, wearing a headscarf, told
The New York Times at the height of the protests.
Taksim also lays bare what many consider to be the defining fault line
of Turkish society. At one end of the square is a mosque. At the
other, draped in Turkish flags, stands a giant portrait of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey’s secular political state.
It was Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, who set about
dragging the country into the 20th century. As part of his modernising
drive, he preached the virtues of secular democracy and mandated the
use of Latin script, European dress and greater equality for women.
For almost a century, it was Ataturk’s vision that prevailed and
whenever Islam strayed into the political realm, the Turkish military
stepped in to secure his secular legacy.
By turn of the 21st century, however, Turkey was in crisis. Its
political class was in disarray and its economy was in free fall. Into
the breach stepped Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul
and leader of the nominally Islamist Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi
(Justice and Development Party, or AKP). Erdogan and his AKP won in a
landslide in 2002, increased its majority in 2007, and did so again in
2011.
Despite Erdogan’s Islamist leanings, the Turkish military remained on
the sidelines. That they have done so owes much to Erdogan’s
popularity – to move against the AKP would have been deeply unpopular.
But Erdogan’s longevity also derives from his skilful negotiation of
the country’s secular-religious divide. Erdogan and his AKP have never
sought to introduce sharia law. Nor have they pushed the more
extremist elements of Islamist philosophy.
Instead, his government built its popularity around an inclusive
coalition that attracted pious and liberal Muslims alike without
threatening the secular foundations of the Turkish state. To stay on
the right side of the law, Erdogan even abandoned Islamism as the
party’s official philosophy for one of “conservative democracy”.
This combination of wily political ways, an appeal to voters across a
broad cross-section of Turkish society and a cleverly constructed
version of political Islam-lite all helped to transform Erdogan into
the most effective Turkish leader since Ataturk.
And then something happened. Over time, unfettered by effective
political opposition and having cowed the mainstream Turkish media
into submission, Erdogan lost his calm authority and began to display
an authoritarian streak. At first, he bulldozed through a series of
signature development projects – a bridge whose name celebrates an
Ottoman-era general who once massacred minorities, a new mosque that
commandeered a park – each of which has eaten away at the city’s green
and open spaces and alienated important sectors of Turkish society.
Then, little by little, he began to push an increasingly conservative
Islamist agenda: he banned the sale of alcohol after 10pm and even
berated couples for kissing on public transport.
Once it would have been the military who stepped in to curb Erdogan’s
excesses. This time it was the Turkish people who took matters into
their own hands.
IF THERE is an Islamist-secular divide in Turkey, it would appear to
owe more to the posturing of politicians than to any meaningful
popular division at large in the nation.
It was Ataturk who made secularism the philosophy of power, thereby
relegating Islam to the margins of opposition. This neat dichotomy
worked first in building, and later safeguarding state institutions
that have held firm for almost a century.
But by effectively criminalising political Islam in a country where
more than 99 per cent of the population is Muslim, Ataturk
disenfranchised an important sector of Turkish society.
Under Erdogan, the roles have been reversed and Islam has become the
language of power, while it has been the turn of secularists to be
consigned to the margins.
Against this backdrop, what gave the Taksim protests their power was
the fact that these two fundamental strands of Turkish society finally
came together on the same side. For the first time anyone could
remember, Muslim activists stood shoulder to shoulder with diehard
secular loyalists.
“We are Muslim, but we don’t want religion to dominate our lives,”
Asya Balik, 32, an environmental engineer and protester, tells Fairfax
Media. Like so many protesters, this mother of two was an Erdogan
supporter until the government cracked down on the protesters. Now her
smartphone is filled with images of police storming the barricades and
unarmed protesters being tear-gassed.
“The problem is his attitude,” she says. “He is very arrogant. He just
decides things, without any discussion or negotiation. He thinks they
are the government, they have power. He is behaving like a kabadayi
[stand-over man]. He thinks he is the sultan.”
“We are at a crossroads,” says Murat Yavas. “We are stopped between
democracy or theocracy, but now we are heading towards theocracy.”
It is an exaggeration perhaps, but one that Erdogan himself has done
little in recent times to discredit. At the height of the protests,
Erdogan claimed that protesters had been seen drinking alcohol in a
mosque. His claims backfired when the mosque’s imam countered that the
protesters were simply seeking shelter.
His promise to replace the controversial shopping mall planned for
Gezi Park with a mosque was similarly condemned as a ploy to use Islam
for his own political ends. And in a damaging public embarrassment for
Erdogan, a group of conservative Islamic “wise men” published an open
letter in the online T24 newspaper. In the letter they condemned the
government crackdown and described the protests as “legitimate”.
Just as worrying for Erdogan, a significant sector of Turkish society
which once voted for him is no longer listening. While he was blaming
foreign media and foreign agitators for the protests, Turks all over
the country were switching off state television and seeking other
sources of news.
And when he described Twitter and other social media as “the worst
menace to society”, his statement only fanned the flames of
opposition.
According to one Turkish newspaper, Turkish Twitter users have soared
from 1.8 million at the end of May to nearly 10 million less than a
month later. For the first time in modern Turkish history, Islamists
and secularists were talking the same language and there was very
little that the politicians could do about it.
FOR ALL Erdogan’s troubles, his position as Prime Minister appears
unassailable, at least for now. Erdogan’s political capital prior to
the protests was considerable and although opinion polls show an
erosion of support, a majority still back Turkey’s embattled leader.
Under Erdogan’s watch, Turkey’s economy has made a robust recovery:
the country’s GDP has increased fourfold since he came to power. He
has also made significant progress in resolving Turkey’s long-running
conflict with its Kurdish minority, has maintained a push for Turkish
membership of the EU and has begun the process of overhauling the
country’s antiquated constitution.
“He may seem like he has been coming down on people hard these past
few weeks,” one retired school teacher told The New York Times at a
pro-Erdogan rally last week. “‘But what do you expect when everything
he has built for us over 10 years is torn apart and counts for zero?
Anyone would be angry and act in this way.”
Where the protests have left their mark, however, is in their
rewriting of the ground rules of Turkish politics. In doing so, they
have sidelined existing opposition parties and have denied the
government’s attempts to paint this as a war between Islam and its
enemies. The result is a new political space, a new politics of
previously unimaginable coalitions in Turkish society.
Whether that translates into a meaningful political force that can
challenge the AKP in municipal elections next year, and in national
elections scheduled for 2015, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, amid the ongoing traffic and political unrest of
Taksim, a new form of protest has taken hold. It began when a solitary
protester, Erdem Gunduz, stood in the square and gazed up at the
Turkish flag and the image of Ataturk. He did so for hour after hour.
Surrounded by Taksim’s perpetual movement, few noticed him at first.
But news of the silent, standing protester soon spread across the city
and he was joined by others who have become known as duran adam – the
standing ones. Old men carrying prayer beads and young women in
headscarves now stand alongside students, unionists and liberal
intellectuals. No longer afraid, no longer separated by the old rules,
they stand together in silence, turning their backs on those who would
divide them.