Protests Continue at Taksim Square

After a night spent under clouds of police tear gas, protesters in Istanbul’s Gezi Park on Wednesday cleaned up the debris, fortified their encampment, dressed their wounds and said they would stay on. Though Turkey’s government has vowed to end protests, the park is home to a colorful group of hundreds of young people at the heart of a bid to save the site from a controversial redevelopment scheme that has led to antigovernment demonstrations nationwide, according to Time World.

Riot police moved into Taksim on Tuesday wielding tear gas and water cannons but did not enter the crowded park. Taksim Solidarity, a loose coalition of groups represented in the park, said overnight teargasing had ended any possible dialogue with the government.

Gezi is the epicenter of protests that have rocked Turkey over the past two weeks. They began over government plans to raze the park and build an Ottoman barracks cum commercial development in its place. After footage showing trees being uprooted and police violently attacking a peaceful sit-in went viral, tens of thousands of people took to the streets. The sit-in in the park grew into an occupation uniting dissidents of all stripes protesting Erdogan’s increasingly heavy-handed rule. Protests spread to other cities and met with police intervention. Clashes continued in the capital Ankara on Tuesday night.

The upheaval in Istanbul’s city center has put the government in a tight spot. Tourism is suffering and the economy is under pressure. Hundreds of lawyers packed the entrance hall of Istanbul’s main Palace of Justice on Wednesday, chanting slogans to protest the detention of 47 colleagues a day earlier in a demonstration supporting the Gezi Park protests.

An unprecedented spirit of volunteerism has kept the protest going. Young students in jeans and white jackets, gas masks and goggles at the ready, busily compile an inventory of supplies. Downstairs in the hotel car park, streams of people from across the city arrive to drop off supplies. At noon, office workers from nearby businesses made their way there at lunchtime laden with bags of toilet paper, bread, cleaning supplies and more.

The protests have had a seismic impact across Turkey; in Gezi, a new generation of Turkish dissent has come of age. A study by Istanbul’s Bilgi University of people camped out in the park found that some 60% have no prior political affiliation.

“There is a new political dynamic that has emerged,” says Sezgin Tanrikulu, deputy head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). He was part of a group of CHP deputies who spent Tuesday night under tear gas in Gezi Park. We need to develop a political language based not on old political fault lines but new issues like environmentalism, pluralism and respect of everyone’s way of life.”

M.D