On June 2nd, Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismissed the protesters as a fringe element, declaring that he didn’t need permission from a handful of çapulcu (“looters” or “marauders”) in order to carry out his plans for the country. The colorful word choice, combined with the misstatement of the scale of the protests, had a comic effect, and çapulcu became a national punch line. An English variant, chapulling, appeared in Wikipedia. Noam Chomsky released a video message indicating that he, too, was a çapulcu. By that point, Gezi Park had become a vast, confounding, utopian encampment, where thousands convened every day and hundreds slept every night, where the People’s Çapulcu Barber gave free haircuts, the Çapulcu Library distributed free books, and the ideals of nationalism, Communism, socialism, feminism, and Kurdish self-determination seemed to coexist peacefully under slogans like “Everyday I’m Chapulling.”
Everyone was waiting for Erdoğan’s next move, which came unexpectedly, early on June 11th, when riot police came to clear Taksim Square with pepper spray and water cannons. Calls for peaceful retaliation were circulated on Twitter and Facebook and, by seven in the evening, tens of thousands had gathered in Taksim square. I stopped by to see what was happening. The glass elevator down to the metro had been smashed, pavement uprooted. Venders were selling face masks to the few people who didn’t have one yet. A construction vehicle was on fire, sending flames and huge billows of black smoke into the sky. Flag sellers were making their way across the ravaged, smoke-filled square, carrying armloads of red Turkish flags.
A friend and I went to a nearby fast-food chain and sat on the roof terrace, overlooking the square. That’s where we were when the riot police started firing tear gas into the crowd below. Two men at the next table pulled out gas masks and a television camera, and started recording a news segment. The other diners ran inside. I lingered for a second or two, watching the clouds of gas roll majestically along the street, though I realized in the next instant that they couldn’t be moving as slowly as I had thought, since they so easily outpaced the crowds of people trying to run away. The gas reached the terrace, darkening the sky, and I hurried inside.
The glass doors didn’t do much to keep out the gas. For a while, we were all deeply miserable. As tears streamed down our faces, I apologized to my friend for my poor choice of restaurant. “I’m glad we were here,” she said. “Now we know how horrible it is. I feel like I understand better how angry people must be.” But the atmosphere in the restaurant seemed not angry so much as mildly disgruntled. “The honorless ones are firing at us,” one man remarked. “Honorless, honorless,” a young woman agreed. Volunteers distributed milk, which is supposed to help wash off tear gas, while a restaurant worker wearing an apron and fluorescent swim goggles handed out bottles of water. The siege in Taksim lasted through the night and into the next morning.
There have been five deaths to date in the protests. At least ten people have lost an eye to plastic bullets. One aid worker told me that she saw a man’s brains spill out of his skull after he was shot point-blank in the head with a tear-gas cannister. It isn’t clear who, if anyone, told the police it was O.K. to use tear-gas cannisters as projectiles. It’s difficult not to wonder what the police are thinking when they follow the sort of orders they’ve been receiving over the past few days. When I read the news yesterday morning, the item that made the strongest impression on me was an interview by Ipek Izci, from the newspaper Radikal, with an unnamed twenty-six-year-old riot-police officer:
You ask me what the police thinks and feels at the moment of throwing a gas bomb. It’s very simple: If only it would end and we could go home and sleep. If only we could see our wives and be with our children. I’m not the one responsible for these events, but I’m always the scapegoat. I’m the one who suffers. My rights are denied.
You work close to a hundred hours, with a few hours’ sleep on the sidewalk pavement. Provisions aren’t brought, you encounter difficulties when you need to use the bathroom, and, after not showering for days, you smell bad. Someone in such a condition can’t even tell you what his name is. You turn officers into monsters and then expect them to serve in a way that is consistent with human rights. The officers have lost their capacity to think clearly. Did you know that in the past week, five of my colleagues have committed suicide?
(According to Hurriyet, there have now been six police suicides.)
One of my friends saw himself on television. He was kicking a woman who was lying on the ground. “Oh, God,’ he said, ‘that can’t be me, I don’t remember kicking this woman, how can a human being act that way?”
You study for sixteen years, you finish the academy, you become a police officer, and then protesters tell you, “Become a street vender, live honorably!” The system is broken—what’s it going to solve if the police become street venders?
A few hours ago, Erdoğan issued a “final warning to troublemakers.” “Our patience is at an end,” he said. “I am making my warning for the last time. I say to the mothers and fathers please take your children in hand and bring them out.” Nobody knows when exactly the strike will come, but a video making the rounds on Twitter shows a row of waiting police buses, stretching to the horizon and out of sight.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Elif Batuman
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