From Kensington Market to Gezi Park: Gentrification is a global force

Gezi Park in Istanbul has been making headlines for two weeks, tempting the West's fickle appetite for revolution. Last Monday, 50 protestors occupied the nine-acre park to confront demolition crews preparing to turn one of the last remaining green spaces in the city into a shopping mall. Three days later, their number had grown to 10,000.

Western media reports have followed a predictable pattern for anyone bred on the script written by the Arab Spring: an autocratic government, supported by militia thugs, are suppressing the people's demand for democracy. "Democracy" in this context is a messy, sticky term, but surely, like Justice Potter Stewart we will know it when we see it.

Turkish PM's chilling warning: 'these protests will be over in 24 hours'

Turkey's prime minister defied a growing wave of international criticism on Wednesday and issued a chilling warning to the protesters who have captured central Istanbul for a fortnight, declaring that the demonstrations against his rule would be over within 24 hours.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ultimatum, which he said was conveyed to his police chief and interior minister, ratcheted up the tension in Turkey after a relatively calm day following the mass teargas attacks by riot police in Istanbul city centre on Tuesday evening.

Turkey Protests: Police Crush Barricades In Taksim Square

ISTANBUL — Riot police fired tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets in day-long clashes that lasted into the early hours Wednesday, battling protesters who have been occupying Istanbul's central Taksim Square and its adjacent Gezi Park in the country's most severe anti-government protests in decades.

Turkey’s PM to meet protesters this week

ANKARA, TURKEY—Turkey’s prime minister will meet with a group of protesters occupying Istanbul’s central Taksim Square this week, the deputy prime minister said Monday, as the government sought a way out of the impasse that has led to hundreds of protests in dozens of cities.

Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said, however, the government would no longer tolerate “illegal acts,” and implied that the occupation of Taksim and its accompanying Gezi Park would be over by the weekend.

The new young Turks

IT BEGAN with a grove of sycamores. For months environmentalists had been protesting against a government-backed plan to chop the trees down to make room for a shopping and residential complex in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. They organised a peaceful sit-in with tents, singing and dancing. On May 31st riot police staged a pre-dawn raid, dousing the protesters with jets of water and tear gas and setting fire to their encampment. Images of the brutality—showing some protesters bloodied, others blinded by plastic bullets—spread like wildfire across social media.

Turkey’s PM sticks to combative stance against protests

ANKARA, TURKEY—Turkey’s prime minister took a combative stance on his closely watched return to the country early Friday, telling supporters who thronged to greet him that the protests that have swept the country must come to an end.

In the first extensive public show of support since anti-government protests erupted last week, more than 10,000 supporters cheered Recep Tayyip Erdogan with rapturous applause outside an Istanbul airport.

The straw that broke the camel's back: A look at the protests in Turkey

Ongoing protests in Turkey represent a popular outburst against gradual encroachment of civil liberties and suppression of dissenting views by the Islamist-rooted government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The culmination of the following issues have created discontent among sizeable portions of society and led to spontaneous uprisings comprising people from every walk of life and a wide range of political affiliation.

-Freedom of speech and media: The number of jailed journalists in Turkey tops China and Iran. Moreover, a growing culture of self-censorship in the mainstream media resulting from sustained government pressure and a prioritization of corporate interests over those of the public has meant that mainstream media outlets have lost their independence and credibility. At the height of the events, Turkish TV channels were running their regular broadcasting.

Memories of a Public Square

In order to make sense of the protests in Taksim Square, in Istanbul, this week, and to understand those brave people who are out on the street, fighting against the police and choking on tear gas, I’d like to share a personal story. In my memoir, “Istanbul,” I wrote about how my whole family used to live in the flats that made up the Pamuk apartment block, in Nişantaşı. In front of this building stood a fifty-year-old chestnut tree, which is thankfully still there. In 1957, the municipality decided to cut the tree down in order to widen the street. The presumptuous bureaucrats and authoritarian governors ignored the neighborhood’s opposition. When the time came for the tree to be cut down, our family spent the whole day and night out on the street, taking turns guarding it. In this way, we not only protected our tree but also created a shared memory, which the whole family still looks back on with pleasure, and which binds us all together.

Turkish Protests Are About Democracy, Not Religion

Protests in Istanbul rage on after police violence transformed an occupation by a handful of activists in a public park into massive anti-government demonstrations around the country.
 
The occupation of Gezi Park, located in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square, was initially spurred on by government plans to develop a shopping mall over the park, one of the last remaining green spaces in the sprawling metropolis. Media outside of Turkey wrongly characterized this as a tree-hugging environmental protest, rather than a battle over the nature of urban space. After the protests became world news, Western media got it wrong again by characterizing the uproar as a revolt against Islamic influence in Turkish politics.

The Protests in Turkey, Explained

Turkey is experiencing its largest and most violent riots in decades as tens of thousands of young people voice opposition to the moderate Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Hundreds of protesters and police have been injured as authorities try to quell the fourth day of demonstrations with tear gas, water canons, beatings, and a tightening grip on the media. Today, Erdogan accused the protesters of "walking arm-in-arm with terrorism." Yet his defiant response is only making the crowds larger. In an echo of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, the movement has been galvanized by images disseminated on social media, such as a picture of a policeman spraying tear gas at a young woman in a red summer dress, her long hair swept upward by the blast. "The more they spray," reads a popular Twitter caption, "the bigger we get."

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Occupy Gezi: International Solidarity for Turkey's Uprising

A relatively small protest at Turkey’s Gezi Park to prevent the ripping out of trees to make way for the building of a shopping mall has erupted into an uprising in which over 1,900 people have been arrested and reports of 1,700 more injured. Protesters say the harsh treatment by police, such as shooting tear gas and water cannons at protesters, is just one more symptom of Prime Minister Erdogan’s authoritarian rule.