Five days after demonstrations in Turkey began against the redevelopment of an iconic park in Istanbul's main Taksim Square, two demonstrators have been killed, mass protests in the country's three most populated cities continue, and police brutality is getting worse, say eyewitnesses.
"I was held and very forcibly beaten around the legs. It was very frightening," said Wicklow man Thomas Keogh, an architectural design lecturer at the Izmir University of Economics. He has been living in Izmir for four years.
Assaulted
He told The Irish Times that on Saturday night, on his way home from a drink with colleagues, he was detained and assaulted by city riot police, despite repeating that neither he nor his friends had been taking part in the demonstrations that kicked off in Izmir on Friday.
“My student – a Turkish citizen – was pushed on the ground and beaten around his stomach and buttocks with batons,” Keogh said in a letter he wrote about the incident last Sunday and published on Facebook. It has been shared more than 3,000 times so far.
“Eventually we got away by being friendly to an officer who told us to disappear up a street,” said Keogh
He said the most “worrying thing” he had been seeing were men who were not police officers but who attached themselves to groups of police and assisted them in arrests and assaults, armed with sticks or batons.
“They’re mostly young and kind of look like thugs – and some of these policemen are definitely happy to have them,” said Keogh.
Despite this kind of police crackdown and the widespread use of tear gas against demonstrators, the number of people taking to the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir is growing.
“At this stage it’s everybody getting out – people you’d never have thought would protest the concerns they have with issues that are plaguing this country,” said Keogh.
Some of the key issues were the “neo-capitalist takeover of public spaces”, and the ideological polarization between secular, liberal-minded Turks and the more religious Turks – representing a quarter and two-thirds of the population respectively, based on the 2011 general election results.
“The main aspect, though, is [prime minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan,” said Keogh. “People feel that there is too much of the ‘big man’ in Turkish politics – he is the issue.”
Call to resign
But as crowds in Izmir this week echoed chants of "Tayyip resign", the question remains whether these protests can be the ultimate determinant of the prime minister's staying power.
Unlike Egypt and other Arab countries, Turkey is a functioning democracy and has been since 1950.
Erdogan was elected in 2003, and received a resounding mandate of almost half the vote in the last general elections two years ago.
He remains the most popular politician in Turkey, while the opposition is widely seen by many Turks as ineffective.
“Turkey isn’t Syria and it isn’t Libya, but crowds are only getting bigger here,” said Keogh.
“It’s definitely frightening, but it’s also very interesting – it’ll definitely climax again over the weekend and people won’t give up until something happens – maybe until Erdogan resigns.”