By Kevin Buckland, Red Pepper
red pepper
Wednesday, Jun 5, 2013
Kevin Buckland reports from Istanbul on the movement so far - and what it means to people
This is a story that spans the continents, and is spreading. The
recent occupation of Gezi park in Istanbul and the ripples it has had
throughout 48 cities in Turkey is filling a political space that exists
between Occupy and the Arab Spring; linking them like the bridges of
Istanbul that span the continents. This week we have seen the violent
repression of expression that marks the fine line between democracy and
dictatorship, the domination of private financial interests over the
common good. We are learning each year that all of our grievances are
connected.
A single tree, in a small park, in the crossroads of the world. It began.
Power is a rebel force, and here in Turkey the prime minister, Erdogan,
is armed with the conviction of a religious man who has been elected. He
has recently passed a series of deeply unpopular but tolerated laws. He
pushed his people into a corner, and has kept pushing. Like many
leaders, he is acting as if the national power is his, because the
millions of people in this representational democracy had given their
power to him. He has played their power like a violin – so loud he
couldn’t hear there wasn’t any applause, and so long he didn’t notice
the rest of the orchestra had dropped out. Maybe he is afraid of what
could happen in that silence.
Pots and pans
Saturday night the silence was filled. From any open window you
heard the people playing their pots and pans as if these utensils were
finally freed to be the joyful instruments they had always wanted to be –
singing their metal hymns for a good life. This is that sound that
comes to fill the silence. People who had nothing in their hands used
their hands, and sat leaning clapping from car windows and in crowds.
The people had retaken the park, and it was Saturday night, so there
would be too many people tonight to do what they had been doing the past
nights. Saturday night felt like a celebration, in some places.
In other places the violence was still building like friction in
any unoiled machine. Violence was encouraged by Erdogan himself, who
broken the media blackout and had gone on TV and asked his supporters to
personally stop 'the terrorists', who he claimed were a marginal group
of radicals. A friend had seen teenagers attack a group of students
because they were carrying gas masks. Erdogan is mixing strong forces,
concocting dangerous politics in an earthquake zone.
These stories I share were told to me by a friend who noticed he
was still trembling to speak of them. He arrived late, because he had
been teargassed again, and so had to shower the chemicals from him. He
told me these stories, recounting like legends in days of this same
week. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Today.
The trees and the machines
Wednesday. It started with machines. The supreme court had ruled
that Gezi, the last green space in the center of this sprawling
megalopolis, would not be razed to make way for a new shopping center.
The rogue prime minister sent the excavators anyway, but by the time
they had ripped out the first of the trees, some 20 or 50 people had
gathered. Some hugged the trees (perhaps the most pacifist of all
possible acts), others tied themselves to the trees. They set up tents,
read to the police and shared food. They called it Occupy Gezi.
Thursday. At 4am the police came and filled the air with
teargas. They didn’t fire the metal canisters at the ground, they fired
it at the people, at their faces, smashing holes in skulls. They burned
down their tents. They kicked people from the trees they held on to. The
police expected to have the park cleared by morning, but by morning
5,000 people were there. A line had been crossed – if people are not
allowed to peacefully demonstrate what they believe in, and if their
expression is met with such brutality, then this is not a democracy. And
if one is obedient, silent or waits in hopes it will pass, than power
is the only one who has freedom.
Friday. These days were battles of bravery and violence. The
police surrounded the park, attacked, and refused to let anyone leave;
later they wouldn’t let anyone enter. Water cannons threw people off
their feet and onto their thin necks, batons cracked skulls of anyone
within range, the teargas canisters littered the ground like confetti.
Police fired gas into residential buildings that were helping the
wounded and housing those hiding from the acid smoke. Police fired gas
into a Starbucks full of people and into the Hilton Hotel. Every
photograph from these days is wrapped in that tyrannical gas.
Violence vs kindness
But opposites attract, and the people who lived in the area
began to leave out baskets of lemons to help soothe teargas. Old ladies
lowered baskets of food from their windows by rope to support the people
below – doing what they could to support those doing what they could
not. Restaurants left bags of food outside their windows. The state’s
violence was countered by the people’s kindness. Lovers led their
gas-blinded lover through the smoke-filled streets to safety; strangers
did the same.
Turkish flags with their floating moon and star sprang up
everywhere, and the bridge that you cannot walk across was filled with
40,000 people walking in the space between two continents. What was 50
people in tents became 5,000, became the more than a hundred thousand
that surrounded the park until they so outnumbered the police that they
were let back into it, and the shade of the trees that were still
standing.
Today. In this small park, a great many conflicts are colliding.
There is the tree that started this, and the fight for the rights of
nature against the cold machinery of progress. There is the fight to
protect the commons: to save one of the few public spaces that still
exist from its transformation into a private space dedicated to the
production of personal capital. There is the issue of democracy: that
the people have the right to speak out, and the necessity to be heard by
those they have empowered. This is history, after all, and people know
that if they cannot speak their mind then it is not their story.
This is no longer a story about a tree, a park, a politics or a
cause. It is a story of a people, all over, knowing that they are
standing on the global frontline of history. It is not a struggle to
change the story, it's the struggle to be allowed to write it.
Tomorrow. No one knows what will happen in the coming days, but
some of that will be determined by us. We need to make sure the world is
watching the trees and people of Gezi square, and that Erdogan knows we
are watching. Where do you draw the line?
Kevin Buckland is on Twitter: @change_of_art
Source: redpepper.org.uk
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