Since May 27^th, the people of Turkey have staged one of the most diverse, inclusive and democratic protests that Turkey has ever seen. People from every political commitment came together and acted in solidarity against a gentrification project, which intended to transform a park into a shopping mall and hotel. More importantly, protests strongly underlined the fact that the multitudes are fed-up with the erosion of their civil liberties, lack of freedom of expression and increasing state intervention in everyday life. During the course of the protests, Prime Minister Erdogan’s authoritarian and irresponsible governmental style fueled more protests. Demonstrations spread all over the country like wild fire. Police brutality against the peaceful resistance resulted in hundreds of injuries and four deaths.

Since the neoliberal-Islamist Erdogan government came to power in 2002, there has been a wave of privatization and appropriation of public and of natural resources. Numerous large-scale gentrification projects were implemented despite public opposition with direct police violence. For instance, one of the most renowned resistances in Turkey was staged at the city of Bergama. After a long legal battle the Turkish government was allowed to operate a gold mine that utilizes a dangerous cyanide-leeching process. Villagers organized themselves against this illegal governmental intrusion. Over the years, with the help of activists and lawyers, the people of Bergama repeatedly won the legal battle against the gold mine—the Turkish constitution protects the livelihood of the people. However, the Erdogan government passed consecutive executive orders to essentially circumvent the juridical system. Ultimately, Koza-Ipek Holding, who had close ties to the conservative government, started to operate the mine in 2005.

In many respects, the Bergama gold mine was the one of the first major political defeats for the people who tried to defend their commons. At the time, many liberal intellectual figures (in the Turkish context these liberals are an offshoot of neo-conservatism) provided support to the government, despite the fact that there has been ongoing massive privatization. In part, some saw the Erdogan government’s struggle to grasp control of public institutions as a justified move against “the ancient regime,” which was represented by the secularist elite and Turkish republicanism known as Kemalists. At the time, the fight against the so-called “Deep State” characterized public agenda. The “Deep State” was initiated largely as a journalistic term, depicting a mafia-like organization within the state, which sought to overthrow the government. Considering the fact that Turkey has a long history of coup d’états, one, of course, can understand and support Erdogan’s move against the anti-democratic military as a legitimate act.

However, the Erdogan government’s crack down on military conspiracy transformed into a witch-hunt, and included many writers and academicians, and eventually largely lost its credibility. Most importantly, public discussions about the “Deep State” effectively neutralized fundamental questions about state power and its consequent paternalistic role in the Turkish society. In other words, the discourse about the “Deep State” was a strategic move promoting to the public the idea that there were two separate Turkish states, one being bad and represented by old regime, and the other being democratic, egalitarian and transparent, represented by Islamists.

The “Deep State” jargon played really well for Islamists as a quasi-theoretical journalistic framework, as they wanted to get rid of any opposition and access all tools and functions of violent state power. From the beginning, the democratization process was not conceived as a legitimate goal but only as an isolated stage where Erdogan government could take control of the state apparatus. The nature of state power did not change. It just changed hands. During this time, poverty and inequality widened. Human rights violations persisted. Freedom of expression suffered, and women’s participation in the public sphere dropped.

Today, thousands of intellectuals, students and activists are in prison, and the majority of them are Kurds, characterizing a poor human rights record. There is tight government control over the media, judicial system and all the other ostensibly independent government institutions. Moreover, as I mentioned in my previous post, over the years, as he increased his popular votes, Erdogan became increasingly authoritarian with low tolerance for his critics. In many instances, he gave orders to independent attorneys and judges, and called on media bosses to fire their columnists. He also blocked criminal investigations of state crimes. As a result, checks and balances do not exist.

During the last ten years, there has been a lack of a salient opposition, in part because of the old binary modes of thinking, but mostly because of Erdogan’s control over the Turkish media and their so-called liberal writers whose primary job has been to constantly attack the left. In this regard, one should understand the Occupy Gezi movement as the rejection of current politico-organizational models and parties, as none of them truly represent the vibrancy and diversity of the youth on the streets at the moment.

During the Occupy Gezi protests, independents commonly stand side-by-side with the nationalists, anticapitalist-Islamists, gays and lesbians, Kurds and people from across the political spectrum. Gezi Park was a site where the possibility of co-existence was proven as a viable model for Turkish society. The common demands for freedom of expression and civil liberties, as well as frustration with the Erdogan government’s authoritarianism, united the people of Turkey. Protesters raised their voices against neoliberal transformation, and reclaimed their commons.

One thing is clear now. Over the course of three weeks, Erdogan proved that he is far from acknowledging what is happening in Turkey, and what the demands are. He is, in fact, delusional and often ill informed about the Turkish society’s demands. Instead of an open dialogue, he chose to repress the revolt, polarize the country, relying on the old binary opposition game that he use to play with the republican secularists. This is perhaps his biggest mistake to date; he does not understand the diversity of protesters and their demands.

There have been clear messages from the streets. Protesters do not want aggressive politics based on nationalist identities, religion or gender. They are ready to form coalitions, talk to each other, and most importantly, they are ready to share their stage with other opposing views. Occupy Gezi was a festival, an inclusive democratic event where participation brought life to a new form of democracy. It was a truly an agonistic public sphere organized from the ground up. If we are smart enough, there were many valuable lessons for the progressive left and the social democrats. It is a hopeful moment. From Istanbul to New York, from Athens to Brazil, crowds are gathering for similar demands, to reclaim their commons, for freedom and for democracy. No matter what the immediate outcome is, a new form of solidarity has been born.

Hakan Topal wrote this piece before the recent protests and repression in Turkey. It provides a perspective for understanding those events, as it highlights the tragedy of Syria and how Turkish policy is implicated. -Jeff

At the end of May, the Syrian civil war consumed more than 94,000 civilians and destroyed the country’s civic and cultural heritage. In addition, the civil war crystallized regional fault lines along the sectarian lines; on the one side Sunni Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, on the other side Shiite Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah (Lebanon) represent ever-increasing nationalistic conflicts.

While Assad’s army commits war crimes, kills thousands of civilians, and unleashes its terror on its population, factions within the Free Syrian Army utilize comparable tactics to bring Assad’s supporters to submission. This is a war with plenty of religious morality but without ethics. In a recent video circulated on YouTube, a Free Syrian Army guerilla cuts the chest of a dead Syrian soldier and eats it in front of the camera. How can we make sense of this absolute brutality?

Islamists who have no interest in democratic transformation hijacked the Syrian revolution. Any salient voices for the possibility of a diplomatic solution are silenced, effectively forcing the country into a never-ending sectarian war. Can the total destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure be for the sake any political agenda or social imagination? What will happen when the regime falls? Is there a future for Syrians?

And tragically, the civil war cannot be simply contained within Syria. It is quickly expanding beyond its borders, scratching local religious, sectarian and political sensitivities, especially in Turkey and Lebanon. A recent bombing in Reyhanli—a small town at the Turkish-Syrian border with largely Arab Alevi minority population—killed 54 people and subsequently, the Turkish government quickly covered up the incident and accused a left wing fraction having close ties with Assad regime of mounting the attacks. It was a premature and doubtful conclusion. Leftist guerillas have no history of attacking civilian targets in city centers. A couple of weeks after the attacks, the Turkish hacker group Redhack uncovered some early intelligence reports that identified the possible attackers, linking them to the Al Nusra Front—an Al Qaida association operating freely in Syria—supported from Turkish bases. The government was silent about these intelligence documents.

Criminal investigation is continuing. However, no matter who executed the Reyhanli terror attacks, be it Assad sympathizers in Turkey, the Assad regime, or the Al Nusra Front, the objective is to pull Turkey into the circle of war by provoking local sectarian divisions. In fact, Turkey’s ethnic, cultural and political fabric is extremely sensitive to Syrian civil war. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan lacks any governmental responsibility or wisdom; instead of carefully navigating the Syrian crisis, he gambles with the Islamists on the faith of Assad’s regime and pushes Turkey to its very limits both financially and culturally. After the Reyhanli attacks, the Turkish public became aware of the fact that Turkish foreign policy lacks any salient political calculation. There is no exit strategy. At this moment, Turkish minorities are on high alert, feeling the increasing religious and nationalistic oppression and day-to-day discrimination. Today, in a ground-breaking ceremony, Erdogan named the third Bosporus bridge as Yavuz Sultan Selim, the Ottoman king who persecuted Anatolian Alevis in the end of 15^th and beginning of the 16^th centuries.

Since the Islamists took control of the government over a decade ago, neo-Ottomanist imperialist ambitions have fueled Turkish foreign policy. Erdogan and his team imagined a Middle East where Turkey plays a big brother role, leading regional economic transformation into a big functioning market. The transformation in the region after the second Iraq war was considered a historic opportunity for Turkish neoliberal-Islamists. Total disbelief of western democratic models wrapped-up with Arab Occidentalism created a fertile ground for Turkey’s increasingly colonialist hunger, that accesses huge young Arab markets, reaching oil fields and extending political influence. These imperial ambitions at first presented themselves via so-called “soft power” moves; Erdogan established very close connections with the regions’ notorious dictators and leaders. For instance, he frequently visited Assad and his family, and called him a close friend. He had no trouble receiving the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights in Libya for his “distinguished service to humanity”—no, this is not a joke. He supported Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, a war criminal whose supporters committed genocide in Darfur.

When it comes to Arab Springs, Erdogan and his team were caught unprepared. He scrambled his policies to adjust to the reality on the ground. These days, when it comes to Syria, Erdogan speaks about democracy and human rights, he (rightly so) asks Assad to step down and stop committing war crimes. However, how can we trust an Islamist who has been a keen supporter of war criminals?

A year ago, with direct knowledge of the government, Turkish military planes bombed and killed 34 Kurdish (Turkish) citizens from Roboski village, who were simply smuggling gas and cigarettes. It has been over 500 days since the incident and the Turkish government blocked any attempts for a criminal investigation. Currently, there are thousands of students, academics and journalists in Turkish prisons. In fact, Turkey has one of the worst human rights records within the developed world. Every time the opposition presses Erdogan’s government for justice, he effectively changes the public agenda by bringing forward issues such abortion or alcohol ban to further divide society, playing to his Islamist base. With his notorious temper, street charisma and machismo, he may be a popular figure on Arab street, but with his divisive right-wing agenda, he is far from a democratic leader who can promote peace or democracy in the region. While the Arab youth thinks highly of him, they forgot the fact that what they need is not another powerful patrimonial figure to replace their unfortunate dictators. When democracy is served only as an option for minorities, it presents itself as the dictatorship of the majority. This is now playing out in the streets of Turkey, which I will explore in my next post.

Sadly, if we can identify a common tread among societies in the Middle East, it’s the chronic hypocrisy inflicted by all governments, public recklessness and immunity. It is not Islam per se, but years of Middle Eastern-style patrimonial government that paralyzed societies. Not to mention that internal and foreign policy lacks any long-term strategic thinking. The possibility of dialogue and careful diplomacy is replaced with bullying; politics is understood as a pure power game where those in power have the right to absolute appropriation of commons, suffocating minorities and opposition.

Syria has become a sad corner of the world where there are no good fronts any more. Evil has consumed the territory. Cities are in ruin. Turkish support for Islamists in Syria created more bloodshed rather than providing a swift solution. While Turkey also pays a price for the long lasting civil war in Syria, Turkish foreign policy is sidelined in any decision-making process. The U.S. and EU do not want to step into to the hell— fearing that a western intervention would have larger consequences. In the mean time, as the war is escalating, it is pulling Turkey and Lebanon, two of neighboring countries, into regional abyss. Erdogan’s government will be remembered as one of the losers.

The really sad thing about Syria, whoever wins this war, is that they won’t have a country to celebrate.