Gezi Park revolts: for or against democracy?

• Author: Yayla, Atilla
• Position: COMMENTARY - Essay

The Gezi Park events were without doubt among the most significant social developments in the history of Turkey. Although the country witnessed horrible acts of terror leading up to the military coup on September 12th, 1980, the perpetrators of violence at the time consisted of small marginal groups detached from the general public and mostly fought among themselves. They did not resort to street violence nor did they occupy public spaces. The subtext of violent clashes was purely ideological. There was a struggle between left groups that embraced violence as a revolutionary means and right-wing factions fighting fire with fire. In hindsight, it became clear that operatives of a 'deep state' manipulated both warring parties to undermine democracy.

The most recent wave of unrests were also unprecedented in terms of media attention. The protests surpassed their initial local and national appeal and, before long, attracted global interest. Meanwhile, the events represented a complex phenomenon that proved challenging to comprehend. The movement had many faces and numerous components. This was precisely why observers within the country and elsewhere could reach entirely different conclusions about the nature of Gezi Park protests.

Gezi: A Multitude of Gezi Movements

In order to accurately analyze the Gezi Park revolts, we must first identify and acknowledge the multitude of objectives that coexisted within the movement. Simultaneously, the unrestsidentified several immediate goals along with an extended political agenda. Many observers and commentators were unable to overcome partial evaluations due to their inability to identify the multitude of events, their exclusive focus on individual agendas and their mistaking individual pieces of a puzzle as either the entirety or the sole significant indicator of the big picture.

What exactly happened during the Gezi Park events? It all began when a group of people established an impromptu organization, Taksim Solidarity (Taksim Dayamsmast, or TD), in late May 2013 over environmental concerns of questionable realism and legitimacy. TD originally stated that the protest aimed to save several hundred trees at Gezi Park and halt an urban development project to rebuild the historic Ottoman barracks that the despotic ismet Inonu regime demolished in the 1940s. Before long, the group proceeded to occupy Gezi Park. Occupiers built tents to prevent the general public's access to the park, claimed control of the area, and transformed Gezi Park into a form of communal property. Several days later, on May 31st, 2013, the authorities attempted to evacuate the park through excessive, unjust and borderline criminal police violence that resulted in clashes and injuries. The media's curious failure to report the story, knowingly or not, allowed social media users to blow the situation out of proportion. Social outburst followed. People from all ideological backgrounds rushed to Taksim Square to speak up against police brutality. Among them were AK Party supporters, young liberals and members of 'Young Civilians' (Genf Siviller), a youth organization that built a strong track record in pro-democracy activism over the past years. Protestors clashed with the police at Gezi Park and its vicinity. Fearing the unrest's potential expansion, the police withdrew from Taksim Square and the adjacent Gezi Park. Up until this point, Gezi Park revolts aimed to attain their immediate objectives.

Although the civilian population's violent (yet thus far legitimate and even necessary) response to police brutality should have stopped following the authorities' decision to allow protestors access to the park, what followed was the exact opposite. Taksim Solidarity, whose political agenda turned out to reach beyond saving Gezi Park, resorted to any means available to them in an attempt to keep the unrest alive. Thousands of people proceeded to occupy Gezi Park. Taksim Square, too, was annexed to the original occupied site. Occupiers used damaged public buses to barricade off boulevards leading up to the square. As such, the movement hindered public transportation to the city's leading commercial, cultural, and touristic center and declared the area off-limits for the general public. Emanating from Taksim Square, violence rapidly spread across town. Violent attackers targeted the Prime Ministry's offices in Dolmabahce-Besiktas, a neighboring district located in Istanbul's European districts, for the initial three days of June. Mobs gathering in various parts of the city imposed roadblocks and attempted to march to Taksim Square. This violent turn indicated that Gezi Park protests began to evolve into something bigger, as offshoots of the movement surfaced in various other major urban centers across the country. Ankara, Mersin, and Izmir witnessed particularly intense clashes. In the nation's capital, mobs sought to occupy Kizilay, the largest public square in Ankara. Some overzealous groups attempted to storm the Prime Minister's official residence as well as the Prime Ministry Headquarters. Hatay, a border town with Syria, home to a large Nusayri-Alawi community, turned into a ticking time bomb as two natives of the province perished during clashes--a development that aggravated the existing tensions over the government's Syria policy. Meanwhile, protestors harassed devout Muslims, especially women, in many isolated events. Terrified and threatened, some conservative women refused to leave their homes for the duration of events. The Gezi Park movement's broader agenda was thus born.

Allegedly motivated by environmentalist sentiments, the movement rapidly began to echo the various exaggerated and illegitimate political demands of its secular-authoritarian predecessors and targeted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the hopes of removing the country's democratically elected government from power. The most popular slogan among protestors, "Down with Tayyip," attested to this objective. The movement "wisely" declared that it demanded the Prime...