What had the State of Turkey and the AKP Government
done to the Gezi Park Protestors?
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| Individuals hospitalized during Gezi protests by the police forces |
Gezi Park is one of the last remaining green areas in central İstanbul.
It is located on the north east of Taksim Square. It is quite small, hosting
563 trees1, and 465 of these trees cannot be relocated.
The AKP government had decided that Topçu
Kışlası, which was demolished in 1940 by the new Republic of Turkey. Since
AKP is in a quarrel with everything that this republic has done/created, Gezi
Park was/is not an exception. PM Erdogan himself was quite enthusiastic in
order to destroy the park. Because according to him and his colleagues, that
historical building represents the Ottoman Empire, and the park represents a
secular that has overtaken the Islamic Empire, or what had remained from it.
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| Gezi Park |
The demonstrations had quickly escalated, since many of the ‘free
thinking’ Turks were/are disgruntled with AKP’s forced and impellent politics
and applications (Please, refer this blog’s name in this point once more;
Disgruntled Young Penguin). In the last decade that Turkey has been ruled under
Mr. Erdogan’s AKP, there have been many occasions that hurt public conscious
deeply. In the last 15 years (11 years of this durations is under AKP ruling), 241 police officers, 91 soldiers, 17 SWAT team
officers, 45 prison guards, 15 rangers; in total 409 state officers had
been put on rape trials where 50% of the rape
victims were underage but never received legal punishment2. While the educated segment of the public being highly disturbed about
this situation, due to lack of non-governmental organizations citizens stayed
at their home without being able to do anything about this scary fact. Then the
Gezi Park protestors who were just trying to defend a green place in a grey
city were beaten down by the police, and their ‘Occupy Gezi tents’ were set on
fire by the police. That was a tipping point for socially aware Turkish people,
that was an obvious display of AKP intolerance. So people took on
the streets protesting the dictating management. Every single protestor had/has a
reason to be out on the street, some thought that AKP held a crusade on Mustafa
Kemal’s ideology, some thought that AKP left those rape cases unattended, some
thought that an Islamic Republic was on the way, some thought their basic
labour rights were taken from them, some thought women were undervalued in
every level of business life, some disagreed on the foreign policies with
Syria. All these issues have been answered by neither the state nor the AKP
government. It should also be stated that after a decade of AKP ruling, the lines that
separate the state from the government are blurred in Turkey. There are no organization
/ agency within the state that can/may criticize AKP freely.
A State of AKP?
A State of AKP?
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| Caution! There is legal violence in this country. |
AKP has created its own police force, prosecuted army generals that had
been presenting disobedience and some form of resistance to its decision and
prisoned them, re-engineered judicial system by attaining control over
electoral system that decides court and high-court’s members (or members of any
legal part of judicial system), dismissed senior ambassadors and state officials (because they were previous system's representatives), introduced auto-control mechanism on
journalists by prisoning some journalist who dared to criticize AKP publicly
and by tax penalties3 ($2.5bn)
received by liberal media bosses. In the end, what
Turkey has in her hands is not only rapists walking on her streets, but also murderous
police officers whose actions had resulted the brutality shown in the picture
above this article. There is legal violence in Turkey. Please also remember
that a police officer who shot an unarmed protestor in the head is still free
and serving in Turkey, since there are no public prosecutors that might accuse
him of doing what AKP asked.
Every single one of these issues listed on the paragraph above needs at
least thousands of words, and will be addressed in detail in this blog.
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