I feel like everything I write about Turkey is more accurate and informed than the piece before it, so the first post will be so dated and strange by the time I leave that I'll be convinced that I wrote it in my sleep or in a raki hungover. I really enjoy hyperlinking.
I haven't traveled out to Taksim or Gezi since Monday, and I think I'll wait a while before I go again. The protesters will likely not leave and Erdogan won't resign, so I have many more chances to engage with the protest. The last couple days have been inspirational for expanding my knowledge of the context of the protests. We've had talks with local academics and a couple outside perspectives that follow Turkey's politics closely.
The first upset of my initial conception of the protest was that not every demonstrator agreed with the concerns of the few I interviewed. The legacy of Atatürk is important to many in Turkey, but not all. Some of the people that are most charged about the the state of Turkey as it relates to its founder are members of the Republican People's Party (CHP in Turkey) which was actually Atatürk's party at the founding of the Republic and through more than a decade of single party rule.
There are many factions in Turkish politics and in the protest especially, and they are not neatly divided. Some of the larger overlapping factions whose interested are sometimes at odds include Secularists and Islamists, conservatives and liberals, Liberals and Socialists, State Socialists and Marxists, Kurdish Nationalists and Turkish Nationalists, Kemalist and European-minded, Alevis and Ultra Nationalists and Christians and Jews and others. Turkey is not so much a state of contradictions as it is a state of confounding difference upon which nationalism has been built. There are so many different groups that don't fit into my (or the common) boxes that work in strange configurations to reify Turkey's idiosyncrasies. I'm beginning to understand how different this nation is, one based on an artificial linguistic and ethnic nationalism.
(and why is it that Turkey is where Europe ends and the Middle East begins when most folks in the Mediterranean look similar and have roots from all over? Why is it that Europe gets its own special recognition when it's just a hand on the left of Asia?)
The protest that started in Gezi Park and expanded to the rest of the nation is rather heterogenous with many different groups rallying around the ouster of Erdoğan and the discomfort of the encroaching socially conservative policies. What is remarkable to the academics that talked with us is the absence of violence in these protests, especially among people who would skin each other in any other circumstance. This is not complete exaggeration: Earlier in May 2013, Istanbul football team Fenerbahçe fans rioted against police and Galatasaray fans, as Galatasaray won the Istanbul derby. Along with Beşiktaş, the other main football team in Istanbul, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe fans work in Taksim together, putting down the fierce (some of the fiercest in Europe) rivalries for the larger cause.
The definition of that larger cause has yet to be stated, though. With Turkish nationalists, secularists, socialists, Marxists, Kurdish nationlists, Weather Underground-type militia members and environmentalists working together (so far) in harmony, how could any one specific political determination be adequate?
I keep asking myself, What is the lesson to take from Occupy Wall Street's dissolution? That too was a national movement that was strident and specific at first, but slowly allowed an opening for it seems every partition of Leftist politics. The ideological takeover of Anarchists from inside (at least in the New School shreds of Occupy) and the slow loss of steam were larger reasons for the dissolution of Occupy, and those problems will plague any movement based in demonstrations without corporate sponsors.
The protesters in Taksim feel that their way of life is threatened and that their Prime Minister thinks he's a king, so what will it take to turn that bare rage and disgust into political change?
There's no conclusive answer yet and that may be for the best. The disheartened Turks that see their country moving away from both their ideals or utopian vision of what it could be and Taksim provides a space for a discussion, an opening of politics. Maybe this protest, at the very minimum, offers a sense of optimism that change is possible where there was none. Maybe this protest will create something more in time for the 2014 elections.
We will see.
For more information and excellent insight, you can check out Yunus Sözen's article on the protest here.
Many trade unions went on strike yesterday in solidarity of the protesters and hopefully that effort continues. I start my internship with Mazlumder tomorrow, and I'll be away from the action in the Fatih District 5 of 7 days a week, but several folks I know are working in Taksim, so I'll get updates from them.
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