Just over two weeks ago, bulldozers came to raze Gezi Park, a green space in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square. The park was to be destroyed to make way for a reconstructed Ottoman artillery barracks. The barracks would also be a shopping mall, or maybe it wouldn’t be a shopping mall. There were only about sixty protesters at first, camping in the park, and riot police kept trying to disperse them using tear gas, compressed water, and plastic bullets. Then more people came to protest, and then more police came to stop them. (A court injunction against the park-redevelopment plan didn’t seem to make any difference.) Soon, pretty much any group that had ever protested anything was out in the park, defending the right to protest things. A recent poll of over four thousand Gezi protestors found that only fifteen per cent were protesting the destruction of trees, while forty-nine per cent were protesting police violence against the kinds of people who were protesting the destruction of the trees.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 03:16:34 +0000
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