The rift currently dividing Turkey also runs right through the middle of many families. SPIEGEL reporter Özlem Gezer has an uncle in Istanbul who loves Erdogan, a cousin who sleeps in the protesters’ camp and parents who sit in Germany arguing over the unrest.
by By Özlem Gezer in Istanbul
SPIEGEL.DE
I’m sitting in an Ottoman corner booth in Istanbul, drinking tea. I’ve been listening to Sahmi for hours. “Erdogan won,” he keeps saying, sometimes raising his hand for emphasis and sometimes pounding it on the table. Sahmi is a 64-year-old retiree living in Istanbul. He is also my uncle.
In recent weeks, Sahmi often prayed for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a small mosque on his street, asking God to protect him and give him strength to fend off the attackers. Erdogan has never disappointed Sahmi and, even now, my uncle sees him as a victor. Erdogan won the battle over Taksim Square, he says, and now it’s time to punish those responsible. Only then, Sahmi says, will he be satisfied.
He argues that the demonstrators destroyed everything, the beautiful lawns and flowers. They lit city buses on fire and stole police cars. Even worse, says Sahmi, they insulted his prime minister and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which Sahmi supports and believes is best equipped to run the country.
My uncle didn’t go to see the protesters’ camp in Gezi Park, even though it’s less than 15 kilometers (9 miles) from his apartment. But he did hear what Erdogan had to say about the tent city, and it was enough for him: that it stank of urine, that condoms were being kept there, and that the protesters were all terrorists. Sahmi believes that dark forces, from both Turkey and abroad, were behind the protests.
Terrorists or Peaceful Protesters?
Is he talking about a different place? I spent a lot of time with the people in Gezi Park in recent weeks, talking to them for days on end. We were attacked, I inhaled tear gas, I fled from the police and I was almost arrested. And now my uncle is saying that these people are all terrorists?
Sahmi, of all people — married to my mother’s sister, my father’s childhood friend, the person who took me to the zoo for the first time — is more of a stranger to me than ever before.
I was in Berlin when the protests began in Istanbul. I sat at my computer and watched the live stream of a Norwegian broadcaster reporting from Taksim Square. There were teargas grenades flying through the air, and it looked like a battlefield. I tried to understand what was happening in this city, where I spent every summer as a child. So I called my father, who said: “It’s a revolution against the Sultan, finally.” My mother shouted into the telephone, saying it was provocateurs who were trying to divide the country.
Then I called my best friend Ümit in Istanbul. He had just fled from Taksim into a side street, had inhaled teargas, and the water laced with chemicals used by the police was burning his skin. He said: “There’s a war going on here. And the press is asleep.” I booked a flight to Istanbul.
Since then, everyone in my family has been trying to explain to me what is currently happening in Turkey.