Insight from Istanbul, Turkey.

This post was also posted on Dr. İbikoğlu’s blog where he has been contextualizing the Turkish protests.

I have shared some protest graffiti before. This time I will try to translate some other examples of ingenious protest humor. This is gonna be fun!

You shall step on wet bathroom slippers with socks on your feet RTE (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan)

A perfect peaceful curse, don’t you think?

Here is a perfect artwork that plays with the AKP emblem. No commentary needed!

Another piece that symbolizes the #occupygezi’s reliance on twitter. Just perfect!

TEAR GAS

Pepper Dolma

These two images are awesome examples of reappropriating the opponent’s arsenal through disproportionate use of intelligence. The empty cases in these images are empty tear gas cannisters. The first one is used as a lemonade cup with a sliced lemon and a straw. The second one is even better. Tear gas is called “pepper gas” (biber gazı) in Turkish. As you know, Turkey has delicious pepper dolma (biber dolması), i.e. fat green peppers stuffed with rice. Well, there is a stuffed pepper for you!

What helps against tear gas? Vinegar! Lemon!

Unless you lived in Turkey throughout the 1980s and 1990s, you will most likely miss the reference in this one. The actress on the left is Adile Naşit, and the actor on the right is Münir Özkul. They are both veterans of Turkish cinema. I grew up watching their movies. These two scenes are from the same comedy movie Neşeli Günler! (1978 – Happy Days!). This couple, with six kids, have a shop where they sell pickled vegetables and pickle juice. In the opening scenes of the movie, they get into a huge argument about whether the best pickles are made with vinegar or lemon. I really want to congratulate the genious who made the connection between that argument in that movie and tear gas. As you might know, lemon and vinegar are both very helpful in soothing the effects of tear gas! (In case you were wondering, the argument between the couple ends up in a divorce and she leaves the house with three of the kids in a heartbreaking scene. The movie is about how the kids find each other many years later and eventually convince their parents to come together again.)

Erdoğan sitting on a throne of empty tear gas cannisters. It is quite a powerful image. The shape of the throne is another reference to famous TV series, Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin novels.

THE PENGUINS!

If you were wondering how the penguins got involved in the Gezi protests that very quickly enveloped the entire country, here is why. At 1:06 AM, on June 2, at the peak of demonstrations and clashes, CNNTÜRK, a franchise of CNN, was broadcasting a documentary on penguins, whereas CNN International was broadcasting the ongoing events live on the ground. This irony was not lost to the protesters and soon penguins became somewhat of a symbol for #OccupyGezi.

Above is a cartoon mocking CNNTÜRK.

And the penguins were spotted in the protests.
Then the mockery got out of control of course! A video from Bobiler.com

“To Chapul”

On June 2, during the peak hours of protests and clashes, Prime Minister Erdoğan identified the protesters as  “birkaç çapulcu” (a few marauders). Çapulcu almost perfectly translates as marauders: 1) Those forces of the army that harassed and looted settlements on the other side of the border; 2) Looters during public upheavals. This identification was widely perceived as another arrogant remark by Erdoğan and pulled even more people into streets in protest over the following days. Then, as in the case of empty tear gas cannisters, protesters reappropriated “çapulcu” and deployed it as a humorous tool against Erdoğan and the government. For instance check out this wikipedia entry on “chapulling“, or this video below!:

Everyday I’m Chapulling! The next video is in Turkish but you might want to take a look if you need a crash course on this new verb in English:

And finally an international Çapulcu below!

Noam Chomsky

ÇARŞI

Beşiktaş FC fan group Çarşı (together with Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray fans) have been on the front lines of the clashes since the beginning of the protests. Çarşı fans even chased TOMAs (Toplumsal Olaylara Müdahele Aracı – Vehicle of Intervention in Public Events) with a bulldozer they got hold of. They eventually captured a TOMA as well, which they re-named as POMA (Polis Olaylarına Müdahele Aracı – Vehicle of Intervention in Police Events). Below is supposedly the account of the interaction with the police chief on radio when they captured the vehicle:

Chief: Open a hole in the barricades, don’t go in too much!
Toma 7: Understood!
Chief: Now move back, spraying water!
Toma 7: Understood!
Chief: Toma 9, you spray water at the same time too!
Toma 9: ZzZzZz
Chief: Toma 9!
Toma 9: I am Vedat, listening!
Chief: Oh, who is Vedat?
Toma 9: From the open stands, the drummer!
Chief: Toma 7, retreat!
Toma 7: Black!

The final “Black!” of Toma 7 is the beginning of the chant for Beşiktaş with jersey colors black and white. Almost a week after that incident, I came across this picture earlier today:

Left Çarşı activist: Do we have someone who can drive a helicopter?
Right Çarşı activist: If it doesn’t work, we can just drive it on the ground Vedat

Excellent joke about capturing a helicopter this time (while underlining the continuing airborne surveillance of Taksim Square) with a reference to Vedat, the POMA-captor!

The humor of Çarşı fans is also visible in the video below where Beşiktaş FC Çarşı fans call on the police to join the chant. They shout “Red” and the cops they have been fighting shout back “White” – in the colors of the national team. Emphasis on  mutual connections through the national football team is somewhat disarming after all…

The common theme in all of these humorous protests seem to be reappropriation of a tool in the opponent’s arsenal and its redeployment through the use of “disproportionate intelligence”. Let’s conclude with an excellent performance, which mocks Erdoğan’s identification of a protest method – hitting pots and pans together – as “Pots and pans, the same old tune!”:

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Arda İbikoğlu is an alumnus of the M.A. in International Studies Program. He also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the UW and Middle East experts from JSIS served on his doctoral committee. He is an expert in Turkish and Middle East politics and his research focuses on Turkish political prisoners and changing state-society relations in Turkey from the Ottoman Empire to the present. He has published articles and book chapters on this subject, including an article featured in a Special Issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society that highlighted the “next generation” of interdisciplinary legal studies. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

You can follow Dr. İbikoğlu on Twitter here.

Insight from Istanbul, Turkey.

The following emails from Dr. İbikoğlu were reproduced here with his permission. Please note that they were sent to a friend and so the language is informal.

Dr. Ibikoglu has been posting about the Turkish protests on his blog.

Message 1 (March 31):
Hey, we are all fine. A long explanation would take pages. But, it started as an Occupy Movement couple days ago to protest and prevent government plans to uproot a small park in Taksim Square – Istanbul’s very central entertainment district. The police used tear gas, etc., to dissuade protesters, but more and more people have kept showing up over the past two days.

From what I hear, protesters are mostly people like you and me – not organized at all. Police violence brought more and more people and it completely got out of control last night. Even though just a few TV stations are broadcasting the real extent of the events, people heard about the massively disproportionate use of force online and hit the streets last night. People were on the streets all night. We are talking about thousands of people.

Why? Hard to tell really. The government’s Syria stand has been polarizing, but more importantly two recent events: 1) a new anti-alcohol law that bans selling after 10pm and restricts advertising and consumption in public spaces. 2) the ceremonious beginning of a third bridge on the Bosphorus which was named after Selim the Grim, an Ottoman Sultan known for his massacre of thousands of Anatolian Alevis during his conquest of Egypt back in the 16th century. Both of these (and the plans to change Taksim Square) were begun without any public debate.

I think the real cause is people’s anger in the government which received 50% of the votes in the last elections and now perceives itself above public debate. People supported Erdoğan and his party to overthrow the military’s antidemocratic control over the country. Having done that and having received 50% of the votes, now he sees himself as a Sultan-reincarnate.

I am still quite surprised with seeing so many people on the streets. It is an unlikely coalition out there at the moment. Socialist, Kemalists and whoever is pissed at the government are out there. I really do not think it can last. It would die out if the government comes back to its senses and avoids further violence on peaceful protesters. An economically prospering country and its historical capital out on the streets – really bizarre…

Even though I fail to understand it completely, it is overall pretty awesome. We got rid of the military’s anti-democratic control, and here people are on the streets when the popularly elected government seems to pursue increasingly authoritarian policies. This is gradual reform at its best.

Message 2 (June 1):
There are rumors about Twitter and Facebook shutting down but nothing of the sort happened yet.

It is crazy here. While I am writing this, my street is full with noise – people blowing whistles, hitting pans together in protest.

There are pictures of 40k people crossing the Bosphorus Bridge on foot.

This is all very exciting for public dissent. However, as you can imagine, I have mixed feelings about this. The protests about the park are all right on; the protests about the government’s anti-democratic policies and procedures are all right on. However, the bulk of the masses on the street right now are the supporters of the political movements that I find the most difficult: the Kemalists.

Who are the Kemalists? The supporters of the old regime where a bureaucratic elite (mainly the military and the judiciary) ruled Turkey with an iron fist from WWI. It is the first time a truly popular government took office and undermined these traditional arbiters of power. So some of the people protesting right now are no more true democrats at heart than the ones they are protesting against.

But does the government deserve to be criticized? Hell yeah! They overthrew the old elite but they owe a great deal to them ideologically and they do not see any problems in utilizing the power and coercion networks of the old elite – as seen on the streets today with tear gas and other examples of disproportionate use of police violence.

On a more personal note: Is there ever going to be a political movement/protest that I will feel at home and not over-analyze to oblivion?

Message 3 (June 2):
That Tüfekçi post is great. [Here, Dr. İbikoğlu is referring to a Dr. Zeynep Tüfekçi authored blog post that compares Egypt and Turkey and asks whether there is a social media fueled protest style.] Very accurate observations and analyses. The self-censorship of the media is true and very disturbing. On the other hand, she is also right about the limitations of comparisons to Tahrir. After all, AKP is a truly democratically elected government. It is excessive even to call it authoritarian. Plebiscitarian or majoritarian would be more accurate.

Anyway, as things have changed, I’m now worried about you posting these emails. I’m worried about criticizing the protesters now because it has become so politicized. I would not like to be publicly critical of them now even if there might be things to criticize.

Yesterday and earlier today, Erdoğan talked about the uprisings. He upped his own horribleness. He was very critical of the protesters, called them names (like brigands and marginals), and linked them to CHP (the Kemalist main opposition party). All inaccurate. He is either completely unaware of the extent of the spontaneous nature of the public uprising or he is intentionally misidentifying it to his own electorate who won’t hear about the story from their own media sources because of the media blackout.

But then, I was outside just earlier and many people with Turkish flags were blocking the street, honking, chanting, etc. just as I was about to come back inside, a group about at least 500 people were slowly marching down the street.

I hate the use of the Turkish flag in this context. It is suddenly a nationalist event… so go ahead post my e-mails if you like. I don’t mind being a bit critical of some of the protesters because I am supportive of the cause of protesting too. It highlights many of the divisions here.

Message 4 (June 2):
I have read some accounts of the protests today. There are some quite simplistic ones that identify the conflict as a Muslims vs secular protest. I don’t think you can boil it down to that…

This started as a small protest of the environmental activists but when the disproportionate violence they faced was shared in social media, more people kept rushing in and it escalated into a scale that practically no one foresaw.

But as it stands, I think the composition of the participants differ from place to place. Those people at Taksim, those people who have been clashing with the police at Beşiktaş for the past 24 hours, and those people who were clashing with the police and were dispersed and/or taken into custody only an hour ago at Ankara, are mostly (socialist, environmental, human rights) activists in their 20s and some others who are trying to hijack the protests and turn them into even more violent clashes. However, those people protesting on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, or at other cities (like at my hometown Balıkesir) are somewhat older folks who are more likely to identify themselves as secular nationalists and CHP supporters. Here, we see lots and lots of waving the Turkish flag and singing nationalist marches. As I wrote to you earlier yesterday, I feel a lot closer to those people literally fighting for the ground they are standing on at Taksim and Beşiktaş than the flag-wavers at the Baghdad Street.

Anyway, I think what the Prime Minister Erdoğan is missing (or intentionally avoiding) in his outrageous remarks yesterday, and earlier today, is the composition of this unlikely coalition on the streets that quite literally he himself has forged. All these people are united against his majoritarian/authoritarian rule but he insists calling them as “birkaç çapulcu”, a few marauders.

These spontaneous protests may prove to be the undoing of Erdoğan’s own coalition within which he had successfully incorporated liberal democrats, including influential public intellectuals. Only very recently, he had enlisted the support of influential public intellectuals such as Murat Belge, Mithat Sancar, Baskın Oran and Yılmaz Ensaroğlu to render support for the government’s efforts in forging a peace with the Kurdish movement. I am quite sure, Erdoğan and his party AKP will lose such liberal-democrat support after these protests.

In any case, I think Erdoğan’s resistence to appeasing the protesters and adding more fuel to the fire with increased police brutality is forging a stronger coalition against him and it is possibly weakening his own coalition. These protests may yet prove to be the biggest opponent for a party who ended the military authoritarian rule in Turkey.

** The photo attached to this post has been distributed widely but is attributed to REUTERS/Osman Orsal in this article. **

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Arda İbikoğlu is an alumnus of the M.A. in International Studies Program. He also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the UW and Middle East experts from JSIS served on his doctoral committee. He is an expert in Turkish and Middle East politics and his research focuses on Turkish political prisoners and changing state-society relations in Turkey from the Ottoman Empire to the present. He has published articles and book chapters on this subject, including an article featured in a Special Issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society that highlighted the “next generation” of interdisciplinary legal studies. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

You can follow Dr. İbikoğlu on Twitter here.