The Istanbul protests – XV

Standing men and women, Kadıköy, June 18 2013 (photo: Stephen Freer)

[update below]

Latest links.

Journalist Nicholas Birch has an article (h/t Claire B.) in The Majalla explaining that “The alternatives to Erdoğan offer more of the same,” in which he disabuses those—myself included—who may be trying to see in Gül or Arınç an AKP alternative to Erdoğan. They’re like the sympathetic mother (Gül, Arınç) and the stern father (Erdoğan), so Birch suggests. When dad is away—as Erdoğan was for four days in the Maghreb a couple of weeks ago—mom is there to comfort, but when dad gets home he retakes charge and mom stifles herself. As for Fethullah Gülen, BTW, he is much more on the same page with RTE than he is not, despite some differences between the two.

On the Al Jazeera website, Umut Özkırımlı, professor of contemporary Turkish studies at Lund U. in Sweden, has an interesting analysis of “The odour of Gezi: On the dangers of crass populism,” in which he asserts that “The Gezi protests have shown us that ‘White Turk elitism’ has created its own Frankenstein – ‘Black Turk populism’.”

Translated into American, “black Turks” are akin to “real Americans,” mainly from the Red State heartland—hard working, pious, conservative, etc—and with Erdoğan their Sarah Palin (on steroids); “white Turks” are the elitist liberals, who live on the Upper West Side, Chicago’s Hyde Park, San Francisco, Boulder, Madison, etc. C’est ça.

À propos, Jonathon Burch of Reuters reports that “In Turkey’s pious heartland, protests seem world away.” The dispatch is datelined Konya, which is—no offense to Konya—Turkey’s Tulsa Oklahoma. The Konyans generally don’t approve of what’s happening in Gezi Park.

FWIW, Canadian analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya—who has some liaisons dangereuses and may be a bit louche—has a report on a website called Global Research on “The tale of a Turkish summer: is there a link between ‘Occupy Gezi’ and the IMF?”

And Richard Weitz, in a pretty good take in The Turkey Analyst on the Obama administration’s reaction to what’s been happening, says that “Turkey protests rattle Washington.”

À suivre.

UPDATE: Yegane Güley of Öztürk & Partners in Istanbul has a must read article (h/t Claire B.) in The Lawyer, “Protests in Turkey: a lawyer’s experience.” Money quote

The blind eye to Gezi Park legal proceedings is only one example of Erdogan’s “rule of law”. Constitutional amendments on 12 September 2010 provided him with the tools to redesign the judiciary and the legal system and having achieved this, he is now simply uncontrollable. If a court’s decision is not what Erdogan or his clan wants then the judges sitting to hear that particular case are replaced by those who will have the decisions the prime minister wants.

And in Slate, Istanbul-based writer Jenna Krajeski has an article on pious women in the Taksim Square movement, “‘Our Sisters in Headscarves’: In Turkey, both sides want to claim religious women as their own.”