These past few weeks, it’s what seems like endless supplies of tear gas and water cannons are aimed at demonstrators in Taksim square these past few days. They are only peacefully showing their opposition to the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian power trip and his conservative party, the AKP. While the same protestations and extreme police force is being taken in different cities all across the nation, it’s clear that the demonstrations are quickly becoming recurring riots that have the characteristics of the beginnings of a civil war.
Fast-forward three weeks from today when Turkey was relatively over looked in the media. Its economy was booming and its government was stable. There was no news of Turkey on the television stations or the newspapers. That is, until Gezi Park became the headlining story.
Gezi Park is the last remaining park in Istanbul— a small, quaint area of nature that is quite out-of-place among the high-rise buildings and condominiums in the surrounding area. Once Prime Minister Erdogan released his plans of turning the park into a shopping mall, Turkish citizens decided to occupy the area, much like our fellow Americans who occupied Wall Street. They showed their dissatisfaction with Erdogan’s plans and their appreciation and determinedness to preserve the last park in a city that has a population over 13 million people.
The peaceful demonstrations lead to a movement by citizens that caused an excessive use of tear gas by the police force and outrage by Erdogan who deemed the protesters a threat against democracy. Turkey is in uprising against a government and Prime Minister who has slowly but surely manipulated so much of his power to turn the secular nation into a religion based government.
In many ways, Gezi Park represents exactly the situation that is taking place in Turkey now. The harmless trees are the citizens that stand tall, waiting for their voices to be heard while surrounded by unfamiliar ideas and foreign environments. While Erdogan himself is the bulldozer, both powerful and intimidating, anxiously awaiting his moment to destroy was what old and create something new that is new and purely his.
If that connection is of any indication to the future of Turkey, then all is well. Nature will always remain the strongest force on earth, and not even a dictatorial Prime Minister can change that.
While this has already been established with the massive amount of articles being published and breaking news coverage constantly on television stations, a single question remains: What does this mean for a Turkish-American like myself?
Never in my life have I heard such breaking news about Turkey than I have in the past two weeks. Turkey, to me, has always been associated with my aunts, uncles and cousins, and some of my fondest memories while away on vacation and/or spending time with my family. Yet now, that once innocent view of the half-European-half-Middle-Eastern country is now gone—gone with the corruption of the government and the reality of its uprising.
Maybe it is because I was younger. Maybe it is because I correlate Turkey with family and friends. Maybe it is because I know it to be my home away from home, my cultural escape. But with that aside, Turkey’s surmise was inevitable ever since Erdogan released his plans to destroy Gezi Park.
What was such a slow buildup of power and control of a nation on the brink of cultural, social and economic success was ruined by a man and his party that will turn the secular state into something that is the complete antitheses of what its citizens want it to be. I may just be an American who only knows what’s going on based off what I read in the newspaper, but I am also a Turk who strongly believes in the power of democracy.
Melodi Erdogan is a sophomore in journalism and electronic media. She can be reached at [email protected].
