Turkish ARAB SPRING?

On May Day 2013, the police poured tonnes of tear gas on tens of thousands of workers and youth in different quarters of Istanbul, Turkey in order to stop them from approaching Taksim Square.

The government had decided that this square, the traditional venue for May Day celebrations and home to daily political actions big and small, was to be shut to demonstrations this year because development work was being done on a massive scale involving huge excavated pits making it dangerous for crowds.

The Istanbul governor stood at the edge of one of those pits to hold a press conference in an attempt to drive home the threat that these pits represented for people. Exactly one month later, the masses protesting against this development work captured the square and made it the freest part of Istanbul.

Is Turkey on the road to the Arab Spring or is it that the rampant riots in tens of cities will force some kind of leadership change as happened in Britain, when the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher was forced to step down?

Gezi Park, a small rectangle of grass and trees, in the center of European Istanbul, has suddenly become the focus of world attention. A mere municipal affair has turned into a national political crisis. The idea was to level Gezi Park to reconstruct artillery barracks that were built more than two centuries under Sultan Selim the Third.

Environmentalists, protesting against this, were quickly joined by left-wingers, secularists and even some moderate people, who deem Prime Minister Erdogan an autocrat and are fed up of his 10-year reign. The tough crackdown on demonstrators simply fuelled the protests.

During protest, more than 1700 people in 67 cities including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir were arrested and this echoed far beyond its borders in big western metropolises and even across the Atlantic. The slogan of ‘Occupy Gezi’ quickly turned to calls for Erdogan to resign. But Erdogan appeared on TV to say that:
‘Taksim Square cannot be an area where extremists are running wild. If this is about staging a protest, about a social movement, I would gather 200,000 where they gather 20. Let’s not go down that road.’

It is strange that a leader, who managed to improve his country’s international standing and economic performance during the past decade, and had even registered a healthy 8 percent growth rate in 2010-11, is using such rhetoric.

During hi rule, the per capita income doubled to more than $10, 000. Turkey also managed to pay the last tranche of $412 million to the IMF. As one analyst puts it, ‘Turkey is a perfect example of the maturing emerging-market asset class.’ And that is why it was chosen to be among the G-20 group.

Though these demonstrations came at a very critical time for Turkey given the regional uncertainty, and a slow-down in its economic performance, observers don’t see Gezi turning into another Tahrir Square which ended in forcing Hosni Mubarak to step down.

How come a government that came to power through free, credible voting, enjoys a constitutional mandate and was doing well economically suddenly find itself besieged by questions about its legitimacy and even survival?

The answer could be found in the social media revolution. To Erdogan, ‘social media is the worst menace to society.’

That could be true as there is no way to check the accuracy of the information disseminated through that medium, but on the other hand, it shows that the conventional system whereby a party represents the people, who have to wait till next elections to change their government is getting increasingly outdated. This is one of the great cracks in today’s political systems, where existing institutions that administer society are becoming obsolete and less representative of the younger generations who are adapting more to social media and expanding the telecommunication revolution.