Last Saturday, the day after the uprising, I left home to go to Besiktas around 1 p.m. My plan was to go help the people who were cleaning up in Besiktas, walk to Taksim to join the protestors in the square, and then move on to Gezi Park. In my backpack I had two bottles of Talcid, or Rennie solution — which eases the pain in one’s eyes after being tear gassed — swimming goggles — which had protected me relatively well on Friday night — two gas masks, two bottles of water, my raincoat, and a Turkish flag.
A friend of mine and I met another friend in Besiktas who had been there for the last 48 hours to help people during the police’s violent attack. He went around with a bottle of Talcid/Rennie solution in his hand also carrying the injured on the streets into the university building. I saw his blood type written on his arm; he told us that we cannot walk around without that, just in case. I wrote 0Rh+ on my left arm with thick black ink.
We decided to walk through Dolmabahce Road and go up the hill through Gumussuyu to Taksim Square to see what Dolmabahce looked like after the previous night’s police violence. On the way, we saw a couple boys collecting the wasted gas bombs from the Dolmabahce Palace garden. Dolmabahce Palace is where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who started our Independence War after World War I in 1919 and founded the Republic of Turkey, lived in his last years. It is among Ataturk’s most important memorials. We decided to join the gas bomb clean up.
On the way to the Palace’s entrance, three tourists asked us what was going on. We told them that millions were protesting against the government for democracy all around the country. One of them asked, “Well, you vote, right, so it is democracy. What else is there to ask for?” He had made a very serious mistake. Democracy does not only mean elections; it does not end there. I replied to the tourist we could ask for freedom of speech, to start with. I should be able to speak my mind. My high school friend got detained for photographing the protest; there are journalists, authors in jail for expressing their opinions. Saying that we have democracy does not mean the government is democratic. To vote is only one of my rights and I respect the outcome although I did not vote for this government. However, after the elections, the government is obligated to serve the whole country without discriminating against anyone. The police are not anyone’s personal army; their duty is to serve the people, to work for the people, not attack them. The second tourist seemed to agree with me. Having recorded the whole thing, the third tourist asked what we would like to tell the American people. We said, “Spread the word. Let the whole world know.” I hope they do.
Leaving the tourists, we entered the Dolmabahce Palace garden from its main gate, going through the security control. We proceeded to a little grass area and started collecting the wasted gas bombs. On the bombs it says, “Do not target anyone when firing,” which is exactly what the police had been doing for four days all around Turkey.
We had collected about thirty bomb shells in a bag by the time one middle-aged civil official came up to us and asked what we were doing. We said we were collecting bomb waste to keep Dolmabahce clean. He did not say anything and left. He came back in five minutes with ten more men. They said they were palace security, and that it was illegal for us to be in that green space. The palaces are guarded by the police, so we figured these people were civil policemen. We said it does not say visitors are prohibited from that space – there truly were no signs. One of them said it was not our job to clean this place; I said we volunteered since they did not. Suddenly, one of them took the bag with the bomb waste out of my friend’s hands. Although I already had enough photos of the bomb waste, I told him that I would take a picture of that and report it, curious to find out what they would say. One man approached me, raised his hand as if he was about to hit me, and told me to report burnt police cars and to get out of his sight. I told him the Turkish media was protecting the government and the police enough, so there was no need for me to join the dishonesty. My friend and I were surrounded by ten men, who then physically threw us out of the public palace space. Later that night, I saw the Turkish Lawyers Association’s announcement on the Internet asking everyone to collect any gas bomb wastes they found as evidence to sue police forces.
Besides making me angry with their attitude and behavior, this incident made me see how afraid the police force was to be the quantitative minority. That first man chose not to say anything to two 20-year-olds. Instead, he quietly left and came back with ten other men. What was he afraid of? Why did they try to prevent me from taking a picture? Don’t they know there are thousands more of those wasted gas bombs that many other people have collected? How dare they talk like that to two people who are only trying to clean the place up? Why are we enemies to the police when we are only claiming our human rights?
Leaving the palace with rage, we walked up to Taksim Square from Gumussuyu along with hundreds of other people. You could not move in Gezi Park; I had never seen a crowd that big. And it was not just any crowd, I saw people with flags of a very conservative party (Saadet Partisi), I saw people with head scarves, I saw people with LGBTQ flags, I saw the Kurdish party, I saw people giving out bottles of water for free, I saw artists, journalists. So, no, on the contrary to what the media says, this was not a solely secular crowd. The Prime Minister said on TV that day that he was barely keeping the 50 percent who voted for him at home. He implied that 50 percent of the voters were angrily waiting at home, wishing to stop this uprising against the government.
Let me tell you another anecdote from yesterday to prove that wrong:
I bumped into a friend in the square yesterday. We met a week ago in a seminar program on Turkey’s role in global economics and politics. Because the seminar discussions were not politicized, he said he had no idea I was against the government and that he was glad to see that. I told him that I was, to be honest, surprised to see that he was protesting. He said if it were three days ago, he would have listed the accomplishments of the AKP government and have defended them to me, but that this police violence was unacceptable and that he was against the government’s undemocratic, dictatorial attitude. He said his brother, who was a very strong AKP follower, had been in Besiktas the whole night resisting the police attacks. So, no, as someone who protested side by side in Gezi with a friend who had approved of AKP until now, I cannot believe the PM’s unrealistic assessment.
For days people cheered in Taksimm, and the police started gas bombing and using their water cannons around 8pm each evening. In Istanbul, everyone still gathered in Taksim, in Besiktas, on Bagdat Avenue, Kuzguncuk, Cengelkoy and in many more areas of the city on the Asian side. People still protest by clashing pots together on their balconies, turning the lights on and off over and over again in their homes.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has gone off to Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria. He left the country when the whole nation was protesting against him. Were we surprised? Not really.
Image credit: Stelleconfuse/Flickr