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| A man wears a makeshift gas mask during protests in Turkey on May 31, 2013 (AP) |
In the early afternoon Friday,
Turkish police surrounded a peaceful
group of protesters, and, shortly after the end of
Friday prayers, began
to volley a
slew of tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd. The protesters had
been camped in Gezi Park -- a small leafy park wedged near the bustling
Taksim square
-- for days to prevent the ripping out of trees to make way for the
building of a shopping mall.
The number of protesters “suggest the birth of a new Turkey—a majority
middle class that cherishes individual rights and the environment.
Protesters gathered in their thousands in
Taksim Square in Istanbul again on Sunday.
The gathering was relatively peaceful after two days of Turkey's fiercest anti-government demonstrations for years.
Youths had lit fires and scuffled with police in parts of Istanbul and
Ankara in the early morning but there was little violence by the
afternoon.
Thousands of protesters had celebrated on Saturday night after police
withdrew from Taksim Square, the focal point of nationwide protests
against the government.
What had begun as an outcry against tree-felling in nearby Gezi park on
Friday had snowballed into a broader protest against the government's
increasingly intolerant, conservative agenda.
Since the first clashes on Friday the unrest has spread to dozens of other cities.
Interior Minister
Muammer Guler claimed that 53 citizens and 26 police officers had been injured across the country.
He also said that police had arrested 939 protesters in more than 90 demonstrations in 48 cities.
Officials said a dozen people were being treated in hospital.
But Amnesty International reported two deaths and more than a thousand injured.
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who retains vast public support, especially among the conservative rural
population that has slowly migrated to the city, all but ensuring victor, has chastised the protests, claiming
that the hundreds of people were unfamiliar with
Ottoman history, and
that the projects
would continue unabated. In turn, the police have been using tear
gas to forcibly evict the protesters camped in the park. As the use of
force has
escalated, the protests have morphed from an occupy style movement
into a larger-scale rebuke of the AKP's heavy-handed rule. The protests
have now spread
to Kocaeli, Edirne, Afyon,
Eskisehir, Bodrum, Antalya, Aydin,
Trabzon,
Mugla, Mersin, Ankara, Adana, and Konya.
My Christadelphian brothers where this weekend under attack from two
over drunk Turkish men and they broke their apartment door and they just
could hold the door until Police came . Police came and blamed them to
being in their country. They told them “if you have complaint from them
come to Police office” but they suggested them to give up about this.
My brethren thought they could help them but when they went to the
Police office they accused them to have stimulated them and released
them before their eyes.
The bad news is that guys living in their apartment and they are not
safe any more in Turkey. “This is the justice that we have here and our
rights when we our refugees in Turkey .” they say. “I don’t blame any
one and this world has so many suffering inside but i had so many of
them in my life. This is just a beginning for us with this problem .
Need your prayer and nothing more …” Mahan From Kayseri-Turkey
It is such a shame that the beautiful work Atta Turk had done is nearly
all gone. The separation of state and religion would have been the best
guaranty for building up a society where different people and different
religions could live peacefully together.
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Find some photographs form the protests in Turkey:
Protest
