Tag Archives: Taksim Square

Government, Politics, Turkey

Turkey protests, little sign of compromise…

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, should listen to the vibes all around him. Mr Erdogan is not Hosni Mubarak, the former deposed and ousted Egyptian leader, and Turkey is not Egypt, a country that went through root and branch upheaval during the revolt of the Arab Spring. Whilst disturbances in Turkey will not amount to a ‘Turkish Spring’, Mr Erdogan should listen to those who elected him: by reigning in his hubris and his divisive politics.

Erdogan still has a choice between rising to the heights of statesmanship of former French President Charles de Gaulle or by spending his remaining political life as a Turkish likeness of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The questions being asked of Mr Erdogan is whether he has the political determination to accept the demands of the initial protestors, which started in the occupied Gezi Park. Those frustrations are being asked, too, in Turkey’s capital Ankara, on Istanbul’s Taksim Square.

For Mr Erdogan to concede to those demands would mean giving up on his personal dream to build the Ottoman barracks on the park and turn it into a shopping mall. But his track record would suggest this is highly unlikely.

Arguably, the single most important trigger for the rapid spread of events was the prime minister’s inability and unwillingness to listen to reasoned critique and disagreement. This inability has manifested itself over the last few years.

Erdogan’s rhetoric has been spiralling out of control and has ranged from lecturing women on how many children to bear to calling everyone who enjoys drinking a beer in a sidewalk café an alcoholic.

What is more, the country has used an excessively violent policing strategy, with which the government has oppressed almost all legitimate protest by trade unions, political movements and student groups.

Such extreme use of force looks awkward in a country where the government was re-elected with almost 50% of the vote just two years ago and where, remarkably, its macroeconomic development indicators tell a story of unfettered progress.

Mr Erdogan’s government still enjoys such popular support, but one should wonder why it is unable to tolerate a few protests here and there and why it appears incapable of giving into what are very reasonable demands against the excesses of environmental degradation and rent-based urban renewal policies.

And why would an elected prime minister, who has, until now, been respected abroad and at home, use the force of his security apparatus to crush so brutally any popular dissent? Such protests are far from threatening Mr Erdogan’s place at the top of Turkey’s political system.

Part of the answer lies in Turkey’s recent record of undemocratic manipulations to bring the government down. Kemalist elites, the military, the judiciary and the so-called ‘deep state’ rogue elements acting within the visible state structures, conspired to terminate the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP)  government from the very moment of its first election in 2002.

Ever since, the AKP has faced several attempts at power grab – from an ultra-nationalist conspiracy in the mid- 2000s (based on unresolved assassinations of Christian missionaries) to the so-called Republican Marches against the election as President of Abdullah Gul to the Constitutional Court’s only narrowly averted closure case against the ruling party in 2008.

These experiences have led the AKP government to look at Turkish politics through the prism of conspiracy theories, and the blame for this paradigm shift does not lie just with the AKP.

More significantly, however, is the manipulations the Erdogan government has faced from the judiciary and the military. This led to the AKP government filling both institutions with sympathisers, adding to an already weak system of checks and balances in Turkey.

The confluence of both the conspiratorial mind-set and a lack of checks and balances has created the ground for Erdogan’s unhealthy mix of extreme self-confidence on the one side and his insecurity vis-à-vis public criticism on the other.

The shopping mall in Gezi Park, the third bridge over the Bosporus, the new airport and a canal project that is supposed to connect the Marmara and the Black Sea have been devised and planned without any public debate or consultation.

That the prime minister sees any criticism of these projects as manipulations by domestic and external enemies is a sure sign of his insecurity. That he failed to grasp that the Taksim protests were not started by undercover military agents, Kemalists, Iranian agents or Syrian provocateurs may yet mark the beginning of his undoing.

What is needed is for Mr Erdogan to be able to arrive at a sober consideration of the situation by giving-in to the demands of the protestors in Gezi Park, by calling an impartial review of recent police brutality, and by giving some thought to his heavy policing strategies, all of which have turned Turkey into a police state.

If he did that, Mr Erdogan would still have a chance to enter Turkish history as a statesman who carried his country into the 21st century, disassembled the military’s tutelage, ended the Kurdish War and granted long-fought-for rights to the country’s largest minority, the Kurds.

If he fails, and drags the country towards polarisation and political unrest, his government, the economy, and the people of Turkey will lose.

Standard
Government, Politics, Turkey

Turkey’s anti-government demonstrations…

Turkey Riots

Riots have broken out in the streets of Turkey, as the people of Istanbul are fighting to keep Gezi Park from being uprooted and turned into a shopping centre.

TAKSIM SQUARE in Turkey is Istanbul’s equivalent to Cairo’s Tahir Square, now the epicentre of demonstrations triggered by construction plans for a new shopping mall in one of the city’s few remaining green spaces.

What started as a small sit-in has morphed into a major series of protests. Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said this was due to ‘excessive force’ by the police. But these protests reflect, in part, the deep ideological polarisation between secular, liberal-minded Turks, and the more pious Turks, representing a quarter and two-thirds of the population respectively (based on the 2011 general election results).

Secular Turks complain that the Islamist-rooted government is intolerant of criticism and the diversity of lifestyles. Mr Erdogan’s robust and muscular stance with demonstrators has reinforced those perceptions.

A typical example cited by detractors is the government’s recent legislative enactment of tight restrictions on the sale and promotion of alcohol, even though the Turkish government’s Household Budget Surveys estimates that only 6 per cent of Turkish households are alcohol drinkers. According to the Turkish economist Emre Deliveli, less than 1.5 per cent of car accidents in 2012 were alcohol related.

At the same time, critics are unhappy at the rapid pace of urbanisation in Turkey’s metropolitan cities. Erdogan is planning to build a third airport, a third Bosphorus bridge and a canal linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara – all of which are likely to destroy millions of trees and a delicate ecosystem in northern Istanbul. A staggering $4.7 billion was spent on ambitious projects last year in Istanbul alone.

Given the litany of grievances and the confrontational nature of Turkish politics, the raging protests may have come as no surprise. They coincide with a rapidly slowing economy that is likely to witness moderate growth rates (at best) for the foreseeable future. Turkey desperately needs a programme of structural reforms if its economy is to fruitfully grow. The Turkish government, however, is not expected to undertake major reform initiatives anytime soon, especially since the campaigning for the local and presidential elections in 2014 and the parliamentary elections in 2015 are already underway.

Despite the rising emotions sweeping Turkey, this is not equivalent to the Arab Spring that led to the toppling of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Unlike Egypt and other Arab countries, Turkey is a functioning, albeit, incomplete democracy, and has been since 1950.

Mr Erdogan received a resounding mandate of almost half the vote in the last general elections in 2011. He still remains by far the most popular politician in Turkey, while the opposition is widely perceived as being weak and ineffective.

The global media coverage of the riots and the disproportionate security response has dented the international image of Erdogan and the governing Justice and Development Party as a progressive force in Turkey’s political scene. Nevertheless, the ultimate determinant of Erdogan’s staying power will be the state of the Turkish economy rather than anti-government demonstrations.

Standard