One day in Gezi Park that changed Turkey forever

Asli Vatansever never thought of herself as a political activist, but she can put a date on the moment when that began to change.

On May 31st, 2013, the then 33-year-old was in her office in the sociology department of her Istanbul university when she overheard some colleagues talking about an attempt by police to forcibly remove a group of demonstrators from Gezi Park.

For a few days before that, people had gathered at the park, on Taksim Square in the heart of modern Istanbul, to protest against plans to cut down the trees to make way for a new shopping centre.

Vatansever had never been involved in politics and had no special interest in the ecological movement. But she decided to go and see for herself.

“I didn’t know what I was going to find there. I just knew that I had to be there,” she recalls over coffee three years on, Gezi Park bathed in sunlight beside us. When she got there, she was greeted by pandemonium.

“The first time I inhaled the tear gas I went crazy. I tried to attack the cops,” she says.

“I knew then that I was in the middle of a certain moment, and I dedicated myself to it. I rediscovered myself as I had never known myself before. And I liked it.”

Upheavals

What Vatansever found at Gezi Park was something she had been looking for all her life, she says.

As a student and later an academic, she had been fascinated by the revolutionary European upheavals of 1848 and 1968, and she had been watching with interest as the Occupy movement had rippled across the world’s major cities.

Now it was Istanbul’s turn, she believed. “It was like a cry from a whole generation, asking ‘could there be another way of living?’”

At Gezi, she was struck by the profile of the crowd. Many, like her, were liberal and middle class. But there were also environmentalists, football fans, LGBT activists, Kurds and even some leftist Islamists.

And while resistance to the attempt to raze the park was the spark for the protests (the building plan was ultimately shelved), in time they morphed into a wider protest by millions over economic precarity, inequality and the authoritarian leadership of the then prime minister (and now president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

According to figures from the Turkish interior ministry, the protests spread to all but two of Turkey’s 81 provinces, with some 2.5 million people taking to the streets across the country.

It is estimated that 11 people were killed and more than 8,000 others injured during the demonstrations.

“It was like we suddenly shook off the cynical zeitgeist and the boredom of postmodern living that we were condemned to,” Vatansever says.

“Suddenly we were not afraid any more – not afraid of authority, not afraid to say no, not afraid to talk to strangers on the street, not afraid to be naive enough to believe that we could change the world.”

Sedef Çakmak, an Istanbul-based LGBT activist, agrees that Gezi was “a really great experience” for the community. It was also a formative one.

“One of the biggest outcomes of us joining the Gezi demonstrations is the increasing visibility of LGBTs within the community, because Gezi gave us a chance to get in touch with other social groups that we never did as activists, like the nationalists,” she says.

“After the Gezi incident, LGBTs started to be perceived as political actors.”

Elected

Çakmak is herself proof of this change: after Gezi, she and 10 other LGBT activists stood for election to the municipal council.

She was elected in the Besiktas district, where she belongs to the leftist People's Democratic Party (HDP).

The broader legacy of the Gezi Park protests remains the subject of intense debate. Some lament that the diverse coalition of groups that mobilised in such electrifying fashion that summer too quickly lost their sense of unity.

Others were disappointed that the “spirit of Gezi” didn’t translate into an organised political movement.

"After Gezi they broke us up. It became more polarised," says Ayse Dincer, another young Istanbuler who took part.

As Vatansever sees it, however, the idea that a political movement would be born out of Gezi was to misunderstand the events of that summer.

“I didn’t expect this to become a movement. I knew it was the start of a wider transformation in the long run. I still sense it. I still sense that the fabric of social relations is changing, but social changes really take time.”

In the three years since Gezi, the mood has darkened among those who took part.

Erdogan has steadily consolidated his power, purging state institutions and passing laws that have weakened the constitutional checks and balances. In the past week those moves have accelerated.

Since last Friday’s botched coup, 60,000 public servants have been purged and the government has declared a state of emergency that enables it to rule by decree.

In January, Vatansever was sacked by her university after joining 1,400 others in signing a petition calling for an end to Turkey’s “deliberate massacre and deportation of Kurdish people”.

Moreover, a wave of bombings across Turkey in the past year have made activists nervous about holding public demonstrations that could be targets for suicide attacks.

No support

Notwithstanding their antipathy towards Erdogan, however, the coup plotters found no support among Gezi veterans.

“The militarist authoritarian tradition in Turkey is the source of all our problems. It’s not going to solve anything,” says Vatansever.

Çakmak concurs. “People are just so afraid that it will escalate into a civil war,” she says.

“Okay, I really don’t like Erdogan. But still, we need to use democratic ways. Once you go into an undemocratic way, there is no way back.”

As Dincer adds, there was a certain irony in Erdogan urging people to take to the streets to defend democracy.

“Whenever we were out, we were banned,” she remarks.

Indeed, many of those who were involved in Gezi are convinced that the summer of 2013 – and the extent to which it rattled Erdogan – explained much of what came later.

“People think Gezi had no impact on the country, but I think Gezi was the thing that changed the whole country,” says Çakmak.

“Right after Gezi, all demonstrations in Taksim were cancelled. There is still this allergy about Taksim Square. If they see three people gathering, they will disperse them.

“Erdogan is obsessed with Gezi. I feel he actually is trying to create a Gezi of his own people now, by calling all his people to Taksim Square.”

Erdogan certainly hasn’t forgotten about his thwarted plans for Gezi Park.

On Tuesday, as the post-coup purge was under way, the president told supporters that he intended to build on the Gezi Park site “whether they like it or not”.

This time the plan is not for a shopping centre, he said, but an army barracks.