Erdogan: one against all
Suppression of protests in Turkey is quite autocratic, in the Brezhnev style. If the authorities seem little to the police, an army will be thrown into the streets. Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey Bulent Arınch 17 of June said: the army can be sent to disperse the protests. This was reported "Lenta.ru", referring to the newspaper "Hurriyet".
“We must stop illegal protests. If the police are not enough, the gendarmerie will take over. If this is not enough, we will engage the army. All these structures are completely legal, ”said Mr. Arinc.
A strange statement, very strange. Is this something that illegal structures are prepared and are waiting for their time? Bandits thugs, or what? Or did the deputy prime minister want to explain to his people that what the government is doing is completely legal, but what the people are doing is wrong and illegal?
Indeed, the official further explained that the police act within the framework of the law, and all complaints submitted to the actions of law enforcement agencies have no basis. The protests against the current authorities, the official refused to be considered legitimate. According to him, rallies in defense of Gezi Park turned into “criminal gatherings”.
The rhetoric is quite erdogan. Well, Erdoganov's ally.
If a week ago, Hussein Avni Mutlu, the governor of the province of Istanbul, apologized to the demonstrators for the unjustified cruelty of the police, who dispersed the protest actions, Erdogan only confirmed that he had followed his previous line.
As the "Lenta.ru" with reference to the RIA "News", Hussein Avni Mutlu admitted on Twitter that the police often acted too hard, though he immediately blamed it on individual errors. Apologizing to the protesters, Mr. Mutlu noted that young people have the right to defend their interests, but urged her to do this through dialogue with the authorities. He further added that he was jealous of demonstrators who had occupied one of the last parks in the city center and who had the opportunity to listen to the birds singing and breathe fresh air. The governor wrote: "I would like to be among you."
It is quite another thing - Erdogan. Softness is not peculiar to him. According to Interfax, the prime minister called on his supporters to “teach” the protesters, by supporting him in the municipal elections scheduled for March next year. Moreover, Erdogan made a sharp criticism of the demonstrators, calling them vandals, anarchists and mean people: “They are so mean people that they insult the prime minister of their country.”
If on the night of June 14 the Istanbul governor met with the demonstrators in the park and tried to admonish them, then the Turkish Prime Minister unequivocally ordered to turn down the tent camp in Gezi and promised otherwise an assault.
The protesters did not intend to retreat peacefully. At night, thousands of Kurds joined those who consolidated in the park. “We want Erdogan to reconsider his decisions! - cite "Vesti" words of Kanan Kalaghan, participants in the Taksim Square protest movement. - All projects for the restructuring of the Park Gezi should be closed! Only then will all these disorders, which have been going on for a long time, end. And we also demand a ban on the use of tear gas by the police. ”
What did Erdogan answer to this? And here is what.
According to Natalya Zhuravleva (newspaper "Sight"), the protests moved to a new phase - after the police broke up a mass rally in Taksim Square and Gezi Park. Against the demonstrators just used tear gas and water cannons.
In fact, R. T. Erdogan himself provoked a new wave of protest with his uncompromising statement. It was after his statement about the “cleansing” of the Gezi Park that riots again swept the country. The storming of the tent camp in Gezi started late at night on June 16 and lasted some half an hour.
Nevertheless, the demonstrators entrenched in the adjacent alleys. In the east of the city, several hundred people marched across the bridge over the Bosphorus Strait towards Taksim Square. The protesters shouted: "Tayip, go away!"
Demonstrators continue to build barricades, burning bonfires. They have stones and Molotov cocktails against the police. The tactics of the last days police are as follows: special cars with water cannons wash activists off the streets, and then law enforcement officers throw gas to the protesting area. Debris and barricades are cleared by the forces of technology. There are reports of the detention of activists. The governor of Istanbul has already said that some provocateurs are committing armed attacks on police.
The recently formed coalition of protesters, Solidarity Taksim, calls for continued protests.
As transmits "BBC", a strike in protest against the actions of the police during the dispersal of demonstrators was declared by Turkish trade unions.
The two largest organizations - the Confederation of Governmental Workers' Unions and the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions - together with the three sectoral unions announced a one-day strike demanding an end to “police violence” in the country. The unions called for a march and rally in Istanbul.
"BBC" reports on the new and blatant details of the authorities' opposition to the people. The President of the Turkish Medical Association, Dr. Ozembil Aktan, told television and radio companies that five doctors and three nurses were missing after assisting the protesters.
Earlier, the Turkish Ministry of Health began to investigate the actions of health workers who voluntarily provided first aid to victims in improvised medical facilities. For what anger of the government turned to doctors? But the fact is that these people “acted without the permission of the ministry”.
In their defense was advocacy organization Amnesty International. She called it completely unacceptable that "that doctors could be threatened with criminal prosecution for providing medical assistance to those in need."
In another report "BBC" It tells about the individual protest of Erdem Gunduz. This man, an artist, for eight hours stood in Istanbul silently, looking at the portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Erdem Gunduz was called “Standing Man”. His performance, which lasted from 18: 00 hours local time on Monday until two o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, gathered hundreds of people who joined him in Taksim Square and stayed there until the police dispersed them. Later, Gunduz said in an interview with the BBC that he wanted to symbolically express his attitude to what was happening.
Ten people who refused to leave the square were detained. “There are many, many young people on the streets,” comrade Gunduz told Bi-Bi-si.
Many people from a variety of political "camps" think the same as this artist.
Grigory Milenin ("Voice of Russia") rightly points out that Turkish society does not accept the Islamist policy of the Erdogan government. The author cites the opinion of the expert of the Center for Analytical Research Semen Bagdasarov, who is confident that the people of today's Turkey today can be divided into two camps, and both against Erdogan's Islamization. Of these, 15-20 of millions are Alawites who do not perceive Islamization. Another, significant part of the population is generally against Erdogan. The analyst recalls that 50% of the population voted for him in the elections. But there are other fifty percent - these people are also against the Islamization of the country.
There is also an opinion that foreign policy actors are involved in the case.
According to Vyacheslav Matuzov, Executive President of the Society for Business Cooperation with Arab countries, the current wave of turmoil in Turkey is a kind of warning for Erdogan from his Western partners:
Using Turkey as their Middle Eastern outpost of the global "spreading of democracy," comrade Matuzov notes, the Americans use the opportunity to once again "shoot" their political weapon on Turkish society. In Turkey, says the analyst, both military specialists and political consultants work. The latter interact with the Syrian opposition, which has taken refuge in Istanbul. The Americans' stay in Turkey allows them to use the tactics of the “orange revolutions” and the “Arab spring”. Thus, they affect the processes inside Turkey.
Blogger El Murid in a note on ITAR-TASS writes that Erdogan hesitated too long, and therefore control over the situation was largely lost.
Erdogan hesitated with both the dispersal of the demonstrators and the “antimiting”. Only almost three weeks after the beginning of the protests, he gathered an impressive rally of his supporters, notes the blogger. However, the emergence of supporters of the prime minister in the arena of struggle can even lead to a slide into civil war. Then the intervention of the army will be inevitable.
And then the trade unions connected.
So what's the root?
A simple explanation is that the pro-pro-Islamist forces are protesting against Islamization in Turkey, the author calls completely wrong.
Erdogan the blogger declares a democrat. It is difficult to find a more democratic prime minister in the history of Turkey than him, El Murid said.
Well, here we know what democracy is.
From the rainbow passage, El Murid turns to the fact that the European choice for Turkey turned out to be a fiction. Why? And Europe is not ready to accept Turkey. True, in Turkey lately a section of the population oriented to European values has already been formed.
The collapsed project of “European integration” brought neo-otto-manism plans to life, the analyst writes, relying on traditionalism and the ideology of creating the Great Turan in its modernized form. And here are two Turkey: conditionally secular Europeanized and conditionally Islamic traditionalist.
However, events are developing more rapidly, the analyst warns. It seems that the prime control thread is gradually losing. Erdogan's personal traits are not very conducive to diplomacy. He is a pretty tough person, believes El Murid, and "his human qualities can play a cruel joke with him."
About the strategy chosen by Erdogan, tells the channel "Euronews". The protesters banished from Gezi and Taksim are now simply standing on the streets and squares in silent protest (like Erdem Gunduzu, we add from ourselves). But arrests threaten them too. The government continues to call the performances "riots inspired from abroad."
“They call the protesters provocateurs, but I believe that the provocateurs are the government and the prime minister. They do not look at these people, they do not understand, they do not want to see what these people need, ”says an unnamed person.
The police are looking for provocateurs in all major cities. Anti-terrorism departments check one address after another.
Thus, the Turkish people, together with their prime minister, who was somewhere in the midst of democracy and authoritarianism, was stuck between neo-Ottomanism and European integration, between democracy and the slide to dictate. In the Western media, the topic of comparing Erdogan with comrade Putin is very popular, which in the West is not considered a democrat either. In previous reviews on the Turkish theme, we have already noted that tough actions to suppress popular protests were openly and directly condemned by the United States. Dissatisfied voices came from the EU (Catherine Ashton). However, it seems that the West began to teach Erdogan’s democracy too late: Europe’s time was up.
But Erdogan’s time has also gone: now he is one against all, and all against him. In this state of affairs, he does not even dream of a presidential chair, for the sake of which he was going to reshape the constitution. The presidential election in Turkey must be held in 2014.
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