THE uprising of the Turkish masses, which began over the future of a park in European Turkey and rapidly spread across the country, including the capital Ankara, forced the withdrawal of the massed ranks of the riot police with their poison gas and rubber bullets, and an apology from the government over their conduct.
The US and the UK have both issued an appeal to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to act cautiously. and to calm the situation down, since if Erdogan and his Islamist government were to go under, the war in Syria would become impossible to wage.
With the Islamist regime of President Mursi under siege in Egypt and the Erdogan regime now becoming the enemy of the people, imperialist policy in the Middle East is hanging by a thread.
What has shaken the imperialist plotters in the White House and 10 Downing Street is the rapid development and the huge scope of the movement of the Turkish working class, along with sections of the middle class, with a local issue setting off a political earthquake that reduced sections of the army and the police to neutrality in just a couple of days.
The US State Department called on Turkey to uphold ‘fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly and association, which is what it seems these individuals were doing’.
‘We urge authorities in Turkey to exercise restraint and not to use tear gas indiscriminately,’ the British Foreign Office tweeted on Saturday.
‘We have become one fist,’ 33-year-old Ataman Bet, said of the mass movement as he swept the shattered glass and burnt plastic in front of his small coffee shop near Taksim Square in Istanbul.
‘This has been everybody – leftist, rightist, even supporters of Erdogan. People are angry. I am so proud of them.’
Erdogan yesterday remained defiant in the face of the mass demonstrations. He also vowed to go through with the plans that sparked the unrest, to raze a park near Taksim Square and in its place rebuild an Ottoman-era military barracks to be used as a shopping mall.
‘We will rebuild the barracks,’ said Erdogan.
Thousands of people have poured out into the streets in support of the demonstrators in other Turkish cities, including in the capital Ankara, the western cities of Izmir and Mugla and Antalya in the south.
A woman said: ‘They want to turn this country into an Islamist state. They want to impose their vision all the while pretending to respect democracy.’
Turkey has more journalists in jail than any other country in the world, with 61 behind bars because of their journalism as of August 1, according to watchdogs. Dozens of lawyers and lawmakers are also in detention, most of them accused of plotting against the government.
Overnight on Saturday, however, protesters in Taksim Square were celebrating their victory over the police, dancing and singing, with some even launching fireworks.
Yesterday morning, protesters were shouting ‘Government, resign!’ as the police continued to retreat.
Interior Minister Muammer Guler said that police had detained 939 protesters in more than 90 demonstrations in 48 cities, though some had later been released.
The Turkish people are now determined to bring the Erdogan regime down, defend the secular state and to end the war in Syria.
The Erdogan regime not only oppresses the Turkish people, it has formed an alliance with Israel and the USA and the UK to redraw the map of the Middle East and to destroy Syria, partition Iraq through some whipped-up ‘Sunni-Shia war’, crush the Hezbollah movement in the Lebanon and further weaken the Palestinian movement to the point where Israel can fix its boundaries as it wishes.
The Turkish masses are fighting in the same trench as the Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian workers, to drive imperialism, Arab reaction and Zionism out of the Middle East.
Their regimes must be replaced by a Socialist Federation of Middle Eastern States in which the working class holds the power, the economy is developed to benefit the masses of the people, and all of its national and religious groups live side by side in peace and prosperity.