Living in Taksim – Weekend Report June 8-9, 2013

The police has announced that they would not intervene at the park until Monday. So the weekend in Istanbul was peaceful, the park full of “tourists,” people who come from all over town to see what’s going on. We even had visits from various family members…

The big event of Saturday was the walk by soccer fans towards Taksim, especially by Beşiktaş supporters. Çarşı, a particular group of fans, has been very active in the resistance since the beginning and they have amassed an enormous number of fans – not necessarily the club, but the fan group. They walked from Beşiktaş up the hill through Nişantaşı. We intercepted a small portion at Elmadağ, a very enthusiastic and diverse group. They were joined by Fenerbahçe fans crossing over from the Asian side, and a smaller number of Galatasaray fans walking along İstiklal. This was what it looked like when they all arrived on the square.

I skipped all that and went to meet some friends at Asmalımescit, and area full of bars and suffering heavily since the ban of tables outdoors last year. People were standing around, breaking into chants and songs every few minutes. The whole area around İstiklal is truly unbelievable, everyone’s smiling. I hear that people are singing on the ferries, in the metro, all around. A psychiatrist wrote about this today, saying people have overcome their fears and have a different stand now. We were talking about this a lot yesterday, especially those who have been on the barricades are full of energy and life. These are not “looters” as our PM likes to say, but lawyers, engineers, bankers with advanced degrees, international careers. The transnational capitalist class become revolutionaries…

But still, my age group appears to be more apprehensive than the younger generation, who are seen as the engine leading this movement. I feel truly “middle-aged” for the first time. Maybe it’s the experience of having lived through a coup d’etat, maybe it’s having seen too many films; I (and most of my friends) cannot be as optimistically hopeful as the young. It is an amazing thing that is happening, no doubt, and things are changing – or beginning to. But we often say this is great “even if nothing comes out of it” or “even if they build the barracks.” Defeatist, perhaps; or simply realistic.

"The jacket"

Sunday was a day full of RTE speeches. He gave 6 speeches I believe, stopping every few miles from the airport into the city in Ankara. He wore the same horrid checkered jacket, and said more or less the same lies at every stop. It’s amazing how blatantly and full of hatred he can lie. Some examples: he claims protestors entered a mosque with their shoes and drank alcohol inside. Truth: they did enter with their shoes, but cleaned up afterwards – they were running in because they were being chased by the police, with gas. The imam of the mosque himself gave interviews saying the mosque was only used as a makeshift hospital and no one drank inside. There are extensive videos of what was going on inside. Another example: his government is apparently pro-environment, because they planted 2,800,000,000 trees. Never mind the environmental disasters they are causing (hydroelectric centrals, nuclear plant planned, cutting down forests everywhere – one petition here) but 2,800,000,000???? People tried to make the calculations, it seems impossible. He maintains his divisive language of “my people” and “my police” versus “those looters.” He also keeps on talking about an “interest lobby” that’s behind all this. No one’s sure what that is, we’re suspecting his advisors may have mistranslated “special interest lobbies” (the sense he uses the word in is the interest in finance, with percentages and all). What makes me truly sick is that he kept on using the policeman who died. He made a martyr of the poor man, as if he was murdered by protestors. The police had accidentally fallen off a construction whole he was pursuing protestors – his own colleague testified that he was overworked and tired. While the PM gave his speeches around Ankara, thousands gathered at Kızılay (the main square there), and were gassed/watered/beaten by the police without showing the slightest sign of violent protest. So the police violence remains, it’s just not in Taksim anymore because Taksim is too much in the spotlight.

Emek protest -
photo Janet Barış

I spent the Sunday morning at the park, which was fairly quiet. This has got to be the best-documented resistance movement in history. In addition to all the protestors shooting videos and taking pictures, the filmmakers in the park had organized six different groups shooting around the park and the activities throughout the day. This is not just the documentarians, but award-winning fiction directors. It looks like we’re going to have a whole batch of films coming out of all this. One of the activities was the protest at the historic Emek theater, the oldest movie theater in the city that was torn down about two weeks ago. We had protested for about three years to stop the construction of -guess what?- another shopping mall (here's an article in The Guardian about it). Again, a very personal cause for me, as it was my favorite theater (as it was for many cinephiles), and my father used to live in the adjoining beautiful Circle d’Orient building as a teenager – that has also been demolished. They’re supposed to keep the façade, but everything else is gone. A huge banner was hung on Circle d’Orient, carrying the lines of a beloved Turkish poet.

We walked from there back to Taksim. There were multiple protesting groups walking in opposite directions. Every time we came across another group, we stood, chanted a few lines together, and moved on. This is a truly surreal experience. I know, I’m repeating myself, but I cannot stress enough how amazing/weird/unbelievable this is. It feels like we’re all in a dream, hoping it won’t turn into a nightmare.