A look through Turkish newspaper Hurriyet today will find nothing of the ongoing rioting in Antakya and to a lesser extent Istanbul despite now going into the sixth day.
Courtesy of jn1:
Solidarity with those trying to oust Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the fascist AKP regime.
Good luck, you’re going to need it but don’t give up!
By Leon J Williams
When I mention the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons/Teyrêbazên Azadiya Kurdistan (TAK) to Turkish people living in Turkey they seem to have never heard of them. Instead stating that all ‘terrorist’ activities carried out in Turkey are the work of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party/Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan).
Why do the Turks think this? Because of the Turkish media, they are told that it is the work of the PKK and the fact that the TAK are FORMER members of the PKK seems to be hidden away from the public.
I was reminded of this issue this morning when I read an article from the Turkish tabloid Hürriyet Daily News with seeming ‘good news’ about Turkey’s progress in its EU application, further reading confused their own audience with some of the comments reading:
“I did not understand exactly what this means, Will they open new chapters or not?”
“Is it really what the headline says, to me it sounds like another delay”
I flicked over to EuroNews only to find an almost opposite headline about the same story…
Left: EuroNews Right: Hurriyet Daily News
By Leon J Williams
A look at the news from around the world shows a clear sign, the people have had enough!
The people are fed up of having their lives dictated to them, being told who they can have sex with, who they can marry, if they can drink alcohol, where they taxes will be spent. The people are fed up of being beaten for expressing their right to free speech.
Enough is enough.
Turkey
The situation in Turkey continues as the anti-government protests evolve into the ‘Standing Man’ civil disobedience. The Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seeming losing the plot with his delusional public rants. Germany has started to stand in the way of Turkey’s EU bid because of the heavy handed police abuse much to Tayyip’s annoyance. Like any dictatorship there is heavy control and regulation of the media with more crackdowns on social media to come.
Greece
Greece’s already fragile coalition government has taken a blow as the Democratic Left Party pulls out over the closure of the national broadcaster ERT. The shock sudden closure caused protests from both the left and the right wing.
Brazil
Over a million people (possibly 2 million) took to the streets in cities all over Brazil after transport fares increased dramatically. The people are angry at widespread corruption and the cost of the upcoming football world cup. No money to keep transport costs down but plenty of money for football stadiums.
Such is the scale of the protests that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is holding an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the country’s most widespread unrest in two decades.
Some pro-democracy victims of police brutality in Turkey
By Ayla Jean Yackley and Seda Sezer
ISTANBUL | Sun Jun 16, 2013 5:57am EDT
Protesters occupy Bosphorous Bridge, Istanbul, Turkey
(Reuters) – Thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul overnight on Sunday, erecting barricades and starting bonfires, after riot police firing teargas and water cannon stormed a park at the center of two weeks of anti-government unrest.
Lines of police backed by armored vehicles sealed off Taksim Square in the center of the city as officers raided the adjoining Gezi Park late on Saturday, where protesters had been camped in a ramshackle settlement of tents.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had warned hours earlier that security forces would clear the square, the center of more than two weeks of fierce anti-government protests that spread to cities across the country, unless the demonstrators withdrew before a ruling party rally in Istanbul on Sunday.
“We have our Istanbul rally tomorrow. I say it clearly: Taksim Square must be evacuated, otherwise this country’s security forces know how to evacuate it,” he told tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters at a rally in Ankara.
Protesters took to the streets in several neighborhoods across Istanbul following the raid on Gezi Park, ripping up metal fences, paving stones and advertising hoardings to build barricades and lighting bonfires of trash in the streets.
Some chanted, “Tayyip, resign.”
Local television footage showed groups of demonstrators blocking a main highway to Ataturk airport on the western edge of the city, while to the east, several hundred walked towards a main bridge crossing the Bosphorus waterway towards Taksim.
Thousands more rallied in the working-class Gazi neighborhood, which saw heavy clashes with police in the 1990s, while protesters also gathered in Ankara around the central Kugulu Park, including opposition MPs who sat in the streets in an effort to prevent the police from firing teargas.
A main public-sector union confederation, KESK, which has some 240,000 members, said it would call a national strike for Monday, while a second union grouping said it was holding an emergency meeting to decide whether to join the action.
“One million people to Taksim” – a call for more anti-government demonstrations later on Sunday – was a top-trending hashtag on Twitter.
“The police brutality aims at clearing the streets of Istanbul to make way for Erdogan’s meeting tomorrow,” said Oguz Kaan Salici, Istanbul president of the main opposition People’s Republican Party.
“Yet it will backfire. People feel betrayed.”
CLOUDS OF TEARGAS
A similar police crackdown on peaceful campaigners in Gezi Park two weeks ago provoked an unprecedented wave of protest against Erdogan, drawing in secularists, nationalists, professionals, trade unionists and students who took to the streets in protest at what they see as his autocratic style.
The unrest, in which police fired teargas and water cannon at stone-throwing protesters night after night in cities including Istanbul and Ankara, left four people dead and about 5,000 injured, according to the Turkish Medical Association.
Panicked protesters fled into an upscale hotel at the back of Gezi Park during Saturday night’s raid, several of them vomiting, as clouds of teargas and blasts from percussion bombs – designed to create confusion rather than injure – engulfed the park.
“We tried to flee and the police pursued us. It was like war,” Claudia Roth, co-chair of Germany’s Greens party, who had gone to Gezi Park to show her support, told Reuters.
The Gezi Park protesters, who oppose government plans to build a replica Ottoman-era barracks there, had defied repeated calls to leave but had started to reduce their presence in the park after meetings with Erdogan and the local authorities.
“This is unbelievable. They had already taken out political banners and were reducing to a symbolic presence in the park,” Koray Caliskan, a political scientist at Bosphorus University, told Reuters from the edge of Gezi Park.
ERDOGAN DEFIANT
Erdogan told protesters on Thursday that he would put the Gezi Park plans on hold until a court rules on them. It was a softer stance after two weeks in which he called protesters “riff-raff” and said the plans would go ahead regardless.
But at the first of two rallies this weekend by his ruling AK Party, he reverted to a defiant tone, telling supporters on the outskirts of Ankara that he would crush his opponents in elections next year.
The police intervention so soon after Erdogan spoke took many by surprise on a busy Saturday night around Taksim, one of Istanbul’s main social hubs, not least after President Abdullah Gul, who has struck a more conciliatory tone than Erdogan, said earlier on Saturday that talks were progressing well.
Erdogan has long been Turkey’s most popular politician, his AK Party winning three successive election victories, each time with a larger share of the vote, but his critics complain of increasing authoritarianism.
He has said the AK Party rallies in Ankara and Istanbul are meant to kick off campaigning for local elections next year and are not related to the protests, but they are widely seen as a show of strength in the face of the demonstrations.
(Additional reporting by Daren Butler, Can Sezer, Asli Kandemir, Evrim Ergin in Istanbul, Jonathon Burch and Humeyra Pamuk in Ankara; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Yellow & Green – Turkey
Special thanks to www.larryhehn.com for the artwork (caption by LJW of ACA’s The Underground)
The UN are looking into reports that Turkey has deported up to 600 Syrian refugees from a relief camp.
Officials at the site said the deportations happened but the Turkish government denies this.
Two days ago a protest was sparked off at the camp following the death of a teenager caused by Turkish incompetence as a power line failed and set fire to a tent.
ACA The Underground 