Cyprus-Forum.com

[Tim Drayton]

The general secretary of the newly formed Gezi Party is neo-classical metal guitarist, Reşit Cem Köksal (below).



http://www.radikal.com.tr/politika/gezi ... or-1157176

[bill cobbett]

More extra-judicial retributions reported today by Hurriyet.

School principals who didn't stop pupils taking part in the Gezi Park protests have been sacked, demoted or reassigned.

"... A number of school principals have been re-assigned as part of the investigations the Ankara Governorship has launched against 101 school directors for allowing students to attend the Gezi protests.

While two principals were removed from their posts and appointed as regular teachers, five principals were moved to other schools within the scope of the probe..."

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/school ... sCatID=341

[Tim Drayton]

24 students, nine of them women, attempted to stage a march in Ankara at the end of which they were to plant saplings in protest at the destruction of trees in the Middle East Technical University by Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, but the police intervened against the protestors, first beating them up and then arresting them all.

http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/?hn=448950&kn=7&ka=4&kb=7

[Tim Drayton]

The 24 students setting out on the march described above:



and the police intervene:

[bill cobbett]

Very exciting news that the feminist collective FEMEN have opened a Turkish office and have issued a statement in support of the environmentalists at the Ankara ODTU and liberal democracy in Turkey.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/femen- ... sCatID=341

Pickies to follow.

[bill cobbett]

Everywhere is Resistance...

397498_543693695716041_68046101_n.jpg

Everywhere is Taksim...

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[Tim Drayton]

The police, while intervening against students who were protesting at the cutting down of trees and the building of a road at the Middle East Technical University, first beat up Hacettepe University student Yener Çıracı and then threw him into the flames of a nearby burning barricade. Emerging from the fire with his own efforts, Çıracı had first-degree burns on his hands, stomach, knees and back. Çıracı, who had previously been held in custody for one month in the course of the Gezi protests charged with membership of a terror organisation, also had six stitches to the head at the hospital to which he was taken. Çıracı said, “We will never abandon our struggle.”



http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/4473 ... yapti.html

[Tim Drayton]

After the first session was abandoned, the trial of policeman Ahmet Şahbaz, accused of killing protestor Ethem Sarısülük, has resumed this morning. Scenes outside the Ankara court complex earlier as protestors gathered:

[Tim Drayton]

In the trial of police officer Ahmet Şahbaz, who shot dead Gezi protestor Ethem Sarısülük, the court denied a motion for the former to be remanded in custody, on the grounds that there was no risk of flight or the destruction of evidence. The court also agreed that Şahbaz could make his defence via a telephone link from Urfa (over 800 km away).

At the end of the session, the police intervened using gas canisters against the deceased’s relatives, causing mother Sayfı Sarısülük to faint. Ethem Sarısülük’s big brother, Mustafa Sarısülük, claimed that a female high-school student was hit in the genitals by a gas canister and the bleeding could not be stopped.

Eighteen arrests were made in the course of the fracas.

http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/4538 ... diler.html

[Tim Drayton]

An extract from From Rhetoric to Reality: Reframing U.S. Turkey Policy by Ambassadors Morton I. Abramowitz and Eric S. Edelman, a National Security Program Foreign Policy Project report. The full report (66 pages) is available at:
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/defau ... Policy.pdf

Turkey’s domestic development has also suffered setbacks. After a decade of significant economic growth and considerable democratization, Turkey’s reforms, European integration efforts, and economy have slowed considerably. At the same time, the unpopular Syrian war, the AKP’s expanding Islamist political agenda, and Erdoğan’s personalist and authoritarian ruling style are deeply polarizing the country. Successive AKP electoral victories, Erdoğan’s personal involvement at all levels of policymaking, and his proud, but mercurial, personality have led him to believe he has a mandate to remake Turkey, regardless of strong opposition to his views. From his decisions about urban design to his pronouncements about how Turks should conduct their lives, the Islamic orientation of his political vision has also become more apparent. The government has increasingly sought to muzzle any disagreement with its policies by reining in press freedom—by bringing criminal and civil cases against journalists, harassing media outlets with raids on their offices, charging fines, and friendly hands taking over or temporarily closing newspapers. Turkey is now ranked 154th out of 179 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, six spots behind Russia.

Such politically motivated harassment, arrests, and convictions have not been limited to the media, however. The AKP has conducted several large-scale criminal trials for coup plotting—known as “Sledgehammer” and “Ergenekon”—targeting primarily the military, in an effort to diminish its political power in Turkish society and its frequent propensity to intervene in politics, including as recently as 1997. They have led to the arrest, detention, prosecution, and imprisonment of hundreds of high-ranking military officials and AKP critics. Not all were innocent; the senior military hated the AKP. But the trials have raised concerns about due process, civil rights, and judicial neutrality.

Erdoğan’s style of rule—viewed by many Turks as an authoritarian swerve from the democratic reforms that marked AKP’s first years in power—sowed the seeds of dissent. In May 2013, those seeds blossomed in Gezi Park. Protests initially sparked by the government’s planned razing of this rare green space in Istanbul soon spilled into the adjacent Taksim Square and spread to many parts of the country.

But rather than calm tensions, Erdoğan chose to solidify his base and rally his very sizeable group of core supporters. His combative rhetoric cast the unrest in sectarian terms and himself as the bulwark protecting observant Sunnis from their enemies. Officials have blamed seemingly every ethnic and religious minority within Turkey for having a hand in the protests. Such narratives have only further polarized Turkish society, not simply between secular and religious, but between the conservative Sunnis whose interests the AKP government protects and all other segments of Turkish society who feel their rights are being trampled. Further social tension has been created by the Turkish government’s aggressively pro-Sunni policy in Syria, as Erdoğan has at times accused Turkey’s Alevis of supporting Assad due to “sectarian solidarity” with Syrian Alawites, misleadingly equating the two sects.