Protesters have been occupying Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey, for nearly two weeks, but chaos reigned Tuesday night as riot police launched tear gas and water cannons at the protesters, the New York Times reports.
The dispute is between the government, led for a decade by conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and conservationists, who want to block the building of a mall in the “last green space” in the city: Gezi Park in Taksim Square. Up until Tuesday, the demonstrations had been mostly peaceful, but additional leftists as well as street hooligans joined in, increasing the number of protesters far beyond the initial range. Close to 5,000 people are now reported as being injured and three killed in the violence.
The first reports suggested the protesters were complaining the government had become authoritarian, trying to impose Islamic virtues, such as not drinking alcohol, on a secular state. In other words, the government wasn’t listening to the people’s concerns or viewpoints, but Mr Erdogan was quoted by the BBC as saying that protesters didn’t have “any issues regarding freedom” but their actions had infringed on the freedom of others and affected local businesses.
I don’t know much about the Turkish government, so I’m going to leave it to international news operations like the Times and the BBC to report on the developments in Turkey. I want to urge you to follow those developments, but I notice a striking similarity of those protests to the student protests in the US: the corporate reformers, pushing the government with their money, are incredibly deaf to the concerns of the people in the schools.
We Americans, since the Civil Rights Movement, have learned to protest nonviolently, calling such actions “civil disobedience,” but the continued deafness on the part of politicians and school leaders over new reform ideas is staggering. If they could hear anything coming from the classrooms, they would stop cold in their tracks with their school reform theories and institute those reforms that students are calling for: more technology, up-to-date classroom materials, safe and comfortable school facilities, art, music, science exploration, more time for reading, discovery, and imagination, etc.
