Turkey is dominated by the runoff election on Sunday – but many Turks are also thinking about the past: Ten years ago there were the Gezi protests in Istanbul. The consequences can still be felt by some actors.
Exactly ten years ago, the Gezi Park protests began on central Taksim Square in Istanbul, the last violent protest against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The pictures went around the world at the time.
Years later, a court sentenced alleged masterminds to long to life imprisonment. Among them is the Istanbul film producer Cigdem Mater. If Erdogan’s challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu won the presidential election on Sunday, she and the others would have a good chance of being released. Her husband looks at the anniversary and the runoff with mixed feelings.
Gas masks and helmets are part of the basic equipment in 2013 on Taksim Square in the middle of Istanbul. At the time, Murat Utku was working for an international television station and was there from the first minute. The 51-year-old remembers huge amounts of tear gas used by the Istanbul police:
Every available police officer was here. And everything was full of fog, but that wasn’t normal fog, it was fog caused by tear gas, which was used against the people of this country. And it was all on a huge scale.”
With water cannons and rubber bullets against protesters
Shortly before the tenth anniversary he is back on this symbolic square. He still has the pictures from back then in his head. The police warned: “You will be dispersed with violence. And if you don’t split up, you will be dispersed with more and more violence from now on.”
The police followed through on their warning. She used water cannons and rubber bullets against the demonstrators. Utku watched everything.
Today, tourists stroll past it and take selfies, children hop behind pigeons, business people buy a sesame ring on the way to work from the Simit wagon.
The journalist heads to Gezi Park, which is a few steps above the square, and points to a lattice fence behind which emergency vehicles are parked: “There’s still a cordoned off police area here on the left. The police are still there. If you then go up here , you get to Gezi Park, where there are still trees. That’s good.”
Rarely has it been so peaceful: demonstrators gathered in Gezi Park on June 2, 2013.
The trees in the park are still standing
In this respect, the Gezi Park protests are still a success today. The park does not have to give way to a shopping center as planned. That’s what the protests ten years ago were originally about. People camp there to save one of the few green places in the metropolis: “Many people sang songs or did yoga here,” Utku recalls.
And then there was the main stage and concerts. “Some gave speeches to the people and the press. That was really important for me too.” A stage for democracy, says the journalist. Only rarely was it so peaceful in early summer 2013 in Istanbul’s Gezi Park:
The police came and set fire to the tents with people’s personal belongings inside.
A man removes a banner bearing the likeness of opposition candidate Kilicdaroglu in Taksim Square.
Incarcerated for a movie that never made
The 51-year-old sits on a park bench and rolls a cigarette. He is not only connected to Gezi as an observer, as they all say here only briefly at this very emotional time. His wife Cidem Mater is therefore in prison. In 2013 she wasn’t even there as an activist.
The well-known film producer planned a documentary after the protests ended. Utku recounts a bizarre court hearing: “The prosecutor asked her they wanted to make a film, where is it? But there is no film to this day. So she’s in prison for a film she never made.”
Just over a year ago, an Istanbul court sentenced her to 18 years in the well-known Gezi trial.
Hope Kilicdaroglu wins
Large campaign flags with the face of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the challenger to President Erdogan, are flying over Taksim Square. If he wins, there would be a good chance that political prisoners would be released, including those from the Gezi Park trial: “We want this country to become a place where people can say whatever they want, where they can make films can do about subjects they choose. And I still have hope – and so does Cigdem.”
Would his wife still make the film about Gezi? Utku muses that he never spoke to her about it. Too much has happened here in the last ten years.