Turkey’s burning rage

Victoria White visits Istanbul’s Taksim Square and the takes the pulse of a country on the edge.

I’M SITTING outside a posh cafe in Taksim Square, Istanbul, drinking Turkish tea and eating baklava. I’ve been here for hours. Every now and then I get up and wander around trying not to look like I’m looking.

But next to nothing happens here on weekdays. The protests are scheduled for Saturdays.

Ataturk keeps watch over the square from under his mighty eye-brows by way of a huge portrait on the Ataturk Cultural Centre. It is taped off and surrounded by police. Gezi Park, a strip of grass and trees which adjoins the square, is cordoned off and occupied by more squads of police.

The police are drinking take-out coffee from Starbucks. I am drinking tea. I look at them and they look at me. This is bonkers.

At last! Something is happening. A woman breaks through the cordon and collapses under a tree. Oh help, it looks like she is having a heart attack which wouldn’t be hard in this intense heat.

But is she bluffing? Is she a protester making a point?

Police are running from every direction. The woman is surrounded but it really does look as if she’s sick. Female paramedics are called and help the woman to a seat. I am still trying to look as if I am not looking.

Now I think the woman didn’t even notice the cordon. Maybe she didn’t even know she was sitting in a park which has been the centre of controversy all over the world for the past month. Maybe she just needed to sit down in the shade.

Which makes the point about keeping the park, doesn’t it?

That’s where it started. A group of five people protesting against the planned demolition of Gezi Park and its replacement with a shopping centre in the form of a replica Ottoman barracks.

Istanbul needs that little park. It’s the most beautiful city in the world but it’s short of green spaces. It’s already described as a “shopping mall paradise” on tourism websites. Surely it doesn’t need another shopping centre.

The protesters were asking what this city is about. Is it just about money or is it also about people? What is Turkey about, now that it is so much richer than it was?

What is Prime Minister Erdogan about? He wants a third airport in Istanbul, another bridge over the Bosphorus. This looks like a kind of empire-building.

Is he returning Turkey to the Ottoman era? There’s a plan for Taksim Square to be pedestrianised with tunnels running under it to take the cars. But is this really an attempt to destroy the square which centres on a monument to the founding of the Turkish republic and the Cultural Centre celebrating Ataturk, the founder? An attempt to destroy the secular republic and build an Islamic state?

An appalling police crack-down on protesters left three protesters and one police officer dead. The Turkish Medical Association reckons that 5,000 have been injured.

And so I went to Istanbul. To stand up for green space against another shopping centre. To make a statement at this point in our European history that people matter more than shopping.

As a child growing up in Dublin I watched Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s Georgian home disappear under Roches Stores and I watched Wood Quay disappear under the bunkers. A massive motorway was forced like a spanner through the inner city past St Patrick’s Cathederal. Now historic Kilkenny is facing just such another spanner going through its centre.

Istanbul, the world’s most inspiring city, was making a stand for people and trees. I wanted to witness it.

But when I got there was nothing to see. It was business almost as usual in Taksim Square. Except for the palpable tension. “Turkiye good?” pleaded the little man with the big brown eyes at my hotel. He has kids to feed.

Istanbul is nervous of the economic impact of the international coverage Taksim Square has got. Nervous that the huge economic gains they have made in recent years will disappear.

It is hard to get anyone to talk about it. The general rule is “Don’t mention the war”. If we don’t mention it, maybe it will go away.

And the protesters are frightened of the police. That is absolutely clear.

I finally got talking to one of them, an anarchist, by hanging out in a cafe behind the headquarters of the Greens and Left Party of the Future.

We were whispering. Lots of the protesters have been arrested, he said, taken from their houses. Four people had died and the judge freed a policeman who had shot a protester in Ankara, pending his trial.

“The policemen tell lies, every day, every day. The television says they just did their job,” he explained. Erdogan is an autocrat, he tells me. He wants to privatise the health system.

“Everybody wants to change but no one knew how to change. But now people go to the street.”

Everybody wants to change? Turkey is a democratic country. Erdogan got 50% of the vote and a third term in 2011 and he still enjoys massive popularity. He held a rally in Istanbul on June 16th which attracted a million people and posters of Erdogan addressing the masses are now all over the city.

No, it’s really much less than 50%, says my anarchist friend. And remember, there is a law in Turkey whereby parties who get less than 10% of the vote aren’t represented in government.

Well, that’s true. But is this a popular uprising? The protests are planned, weekend events. Their impact is massively amplified by effective use of social media, the unrelated context of the Arab Spring and the desire of the Western media to believe that Turkey doesn’t want a Muslim prime minister.

The Turkish journalist Sevge Akarcesme sounds a note of caution. “It is an undeniable fact that some who claim to be the modern face of this country are yet to internalise democracy in its most basic form,” she says.

She wants to keep the park, she says. Currently there is a court order suspending the work and Erdogan even suggested a referendum on the issue. She makes the point that under Erdogan’s tenure millions of trees have been planted all over Turkey.

But it’s not about the park anymore. As the academic and intellectual leader of Taksim Solidarity Murat Belge says: “I’m used to seeing political authority in Turkey so I’m prepared to watch with tears this Taksim barracks being erected. But the struggle for other things has to go on and it’s an accumulation of awareness.”

The Taksim protest has become a banner under which everyone sails who is unhappy with the government. Akarcesme says this discontent has support and it is growing but it is very far from being a majority voice. Its impact is huge because the kind of people who hold media jobs tend naturally to side with the protest.

People like me.

These people are also secularists, as they are everywhere. And Erdogan is a Muslim with a wife, Emine, who wears a head-scarf, in a country founded as a secular republic.

Akarcesme says that protesters have attacked women wearing head-scarves. Though there is a lack of tolerance on both sides of the divide, she asserts that the ‘Kemalists’ are less tolerant than the Muslims.

Writing in Today’s Zaman newspaper she refers to women being forced to wear headscarves in Iran and says that being discriminated against for wearing a headscarf in Turkey reflects the same “authoritarian mentality that would like to have control over the choices of individuals”.

She mentions Merve Kavakci who in 1999 was forced to leave the Turkish parliament because she was wearing a headscarf. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2007 that her human rights had been violated.

Akarcesme writes of generals refusing to attend functions attended by Erdogan’s wife and the impossibility that a woman wearing a head-scarf might get a government job on the basis that she could not be seen to be ‘impartial’.

So you can wear a head-scarf if fashion dictates, but not Allah? Sounds mad to me.

One Turkish academic who declined to be named told me secular fundamentalism had never been Ataturk’s plan. “He wanted to keep religion and the state separate. But the secularists today want to keep religion and the people separate. I have no problem being a good Muslim and a follower of Ataturk.”

Meanwhile in Istiklal Caddesi, the posh boulevard which leads up to Taksim Square, a contemporary Young Turk party has set up an information stall.

“I don’t think Erdogan is interested in Islam at all,” says one young man. “I think he is interested in money.” He hints that Erdogan may now consider Muslim allegiances more lucrative than European ones.

“He is interested in power. He wants to be a sultan.”

A police car screeches past.

“We are against the terror,” says an older woman.

Maybe Erdogan is right to stop looking towards Europe. One young Turkish blogger wonders aloud if he hasn’t orchestrated this unrest in order to get himself an opposition. In standing up against this Opposition he can change course, away from secularism and an alliance with Europe and towards the East.

The secularism issue becomes more complex when you think of the external pressures on Turkey. The West wants Turkey secular. The West needs Turkey as a bulwark against the Islamic East.

Surely that was one of the reasons Ataturk insisted on a secular state? He clearly saw the country’s best interests being served by siding with the West. Which was true at the time.

But is it true now? The Turks must be feeling smug as they look at Greece. Where would Turkey be now if it were in the euro?

The sun is setting on Europe’s empire and Turkey, with its low wage costs and a population half of which is under 30, is well-placed to catch another economic wave as a BRIC country. Though Erdogan formally applied to join the EU in 2005, Akarcesme feels that full membership is not on the horizon.

I don’t think it will ever happen. Turkey is not in Europe, after all, apart from a postage stamp in Istanbul. And rather than waiting for Turkey to look like Germany, wouldn’t we be better employed learning to make friends with our neighbours in the Middle East whether they are Muslims or not?

I have begun to see the colonialism of the West’s celebration of Turkish secularism and the profound fear of Islam which underpins it. And the truth is that the Turkish secular state was run by an elite which I have seen described as “white Turks”.

It has become very plain to me that Taksim Square is partly a class war between the secular intelligentsia and the lower middle class which in Erdogan has power for the first time.

They are the men in mohair suits. The women in mohair hijabs.

“The old elites are not happy sharing power,” says Akarcesme. “They think they are entitled to rule, no matter what.”

And we in the West? Haven’t we spent the best part of half a millennium lamenting the fact that Istanbul fell to the Turks?

Constantinople was the capital of Eastern Christendom. At its heart lay the great church of St Sophia, dedicated in 537, vast and covered in four acres of gold mosaic. As one contemporary put it, “The golden streams of rays pours down and strikes the eyes of men so that they can scarcely bear to look.”

The 13th century Turkish leader, Osman, was said to have had a dream in which the city, “situated at the junction of two seas and two continents, seemed like a diamond mounted between two sapphires and two emeralds, and appeared thus to form the precious stone of the ring of a vast dominion which embraced the entire world”.

It was nearly two centuries later that Constantinople fell to the Turks. May 29, 1453, is one of the most important dates in the history of humankind. Turkish leader Mehmet the Conqueror was only 21 years old but he was devious, brave and determined.

The Emperor Constantine was 49 and he was brave too, holding out through a terrible siege which lasted nearly two months. But the Turks had new technology — cannons — and the walls could not hold forever.

Constantine died in the massacre and was beheaded, and his head — or someone’s head — was stuffed with straw and sent on an international lap of honour.

The women and children who sheltered in St Sophia imploring the Virgin to save them were divided among the insurgents and chained as slaves. The holy man Leonard of Chios lost his 14-year-old daughter to the Sultan’s harem, where she died of disease.

But Mehmet had wanted Constantinople’s buildings to be left intact. It is said he was horrified when he entered St Sophia and found it nearly stripped of its riches. One of his men was digging away at the marble floor “for the faith” and the furious Mehmet had him executed. Then he constructed a wooden minaret and from the greatest church in Christendom there sounded the Muslim call to prayer.

I don’t think we’ve got over it. I have become convinced that the West is still reeling from the fall of Constantinople. Russia spent centuries pining for the city and poor delusional Tsar Nicholas genuinely believed he’d be ensconced in St Sophia after the First World War.

Some of my own passion for Istanbul is for the lost paradise of Constantinople. Made all the more enticing, of course, because it is lost. The icons are just fragments, staring meaningfully out of crumbling mosaics. No wonder sentimentalists like Yeats were fascinated by Byzantium, by which name Constantinople went before the first Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity.

I think part of the reason I high-tailed it off to Istanbul last week when I heard about the Taksim Square protests was that I thought Istanbul was mine. Part of my heritage, as a European. I could not stand idly by...

It was more than that. I saw a strong parallel between Ireland and Turkey, which has had growth rates of over 5% for the last decade, and I wanted to broadcast the message: “Celebrate your economic success which has made so many Turks better-off, but don’t throw out the baby — your culture, your history, your environment — with the bathwater.”

Well I’ve learned a hard truth. It’s not my Istanbul. Istanbul belongs to the Turks. It is up to them what they do with their city.

It’s not surprising Erdogan is so popular given that he has sprung Turkey out of economic stagnation. I have only travelled in western Turkey and on the seaboard at that, which is the most wealthy part of the country.

I know that fairly extreme poverty still exists in Turkey which is still ranked in 90th place for equality in the UN Development Index. Ireland is ranked sixth.

But the western Turkey I travelled as a backpacker 30 years ago has been transformed. When, straight out of school, I first got a train to Turkey, the country was recovering from the 1980 military coup. The place was run by the army, dressed in any number of different brocaded uniforms.

I remember very few headscarves and no calls to prayer. Now there are headscarves, often funky colourful ones, worn by smart women with briefcases and mobile phones.

Aren’t they creating a new Turkey on their terms, not ours? Haven’t we always wrongly dismissed the Turkish people’s right and ability to manage their own country?

That’s why the Allies lost 200,000 troops in Gallipoli in 1915, 3,000 of them Irish. Churchill didn’t think the Turks would bother putting up much of a fight. And even if they bothered, he didn’t think they’d achieve much.

In the open-air cemetery which is the Gallipoli peninsula Churchill’s prediction is carved into the stone: “A good army of 50,000 men and sea power. That is the end of the Turkish menace.”

What happened instead was Ataturk pushed back the mighty British empire and the modern Turkish state was born. And it wasn’t really very surprising. How could the British ever have won against the Turks on their own country?

The undoing of the Anzac invasion of Gallipoli was when Ataturk managed to trick the Anzacs into thinking that a few troops who had no ammunition were a well-equipped army and the Anzacs stopped dead. Probably because on some level the Anzac troops knew they couldn’t win.

The appalling slaughter of young men which followed helped lead to the foundation of the Irish republic as well as the Turkish one, and consolidated Australia and New Zealand into nations.

And it is extraordinary how much respect the Turkish authorities have accorded to the invading force in the Gallipoli memorial park.

It is impossible not to be moved by Ataturk’s words in 1933 to the bereaved on the Allied side: “There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours ... you the mothers, who sent you sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”

The West would do well to learn to have that kind of respect in its relations with Turkey. As Akarcesme admits, the country is not a modern democracy but she thinks it will get there eventually. And Taksim Square is not on the itinerary.