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SALT LAKE CITY — For the last week, protesters in Istanbul, Turkey, have been on the front lines of a battle with their own police and government, a government they say is corrupt and repressive.
Some of the University of Utah's Turkish students have been in Taksim Square, Gezi Park and other parts of the city since the beginning, getting tear-gassed and facing police brutality. Other Turkish students, professors and community leaders organized a solidarity demonstration Thursday in Salt Lake City.
"It started as peaceful camping at (Gezi Park), until the police brutally stepped in and burned people's tents down with their belongings inside," said University of Utah economics graduate student Anil Aba, speaking from Istanbul.
Initially, the protests were triggered by a government plan to build a shopping mall over one of the few green parks in the area, Gezi Park. Activists at first occupied the park, but it soon evolved into widespread protests with tens of thousands confronting police in riot gear. Aba said that there made up mostly of students and activists, liberals with ecologically oriented interests, Kemalists and socialists.
Aba, who is in Turkey over the summer and has participated in the demonstrations, made it clear that the park redevelopment was just the trigger. He said the protests were really about what he considers a repressive government. The actions have been especially focused on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has garnered support largely from religious conservatives in the predominantly Muslim nation. He has spoken out against public kissing, advised women to have at least three children and moved to cut down the sale of alcohol and tobacco.
"He made benefits available for the Turkish (upper class), he made himself and his relatives among the richest people in Turkey; the economic growth in last ten years went, for the most part, to a privileged few. Everything was privatized, life became more and more expensive for the people in real terms, life in Turkey became a harder struggle for the masses."
While demonstrators have support, the prime minister and his party do as well. Roughly 10,000 people gathered at the airport in Istanbul to welcome Erdogan home from a trip to North Africa Thursday. He and his supporters largely view their critics as extremists and rabble-rousers.
"These protests that are bordering on illegality must come to an end immediately," Erdogan said Thursday.
He has also vowed to move forward with the plan to develop Gezi Park.
Kerem Cantekin, who also studies economics at the U. and is teaching in Istanbul for the summer, said the government has arrested journalists, students and activists, claiming they were terrorists, in order to crush any opposition. He said that's part of why he supports the protests.
"Sometimes, even wearing a Kurdish turban (called a poshu) can be the only proof of being a terrorist," he said.
Dr. Pinar Bayrak-Toydemir, a geneticist at the U. School of Medicine, helped organize a demonstration held Thursday night in support of the protests. She has lived and worked in Utah for the last 13 years, but said she is still deeply connected to Turkey and family who live there.
She said the group, called Utahns in Solidarity with Turkish Democracy, wanted "to make sure that the world understands and sees what's going on in Turkey."
"We are just Turkish people who want our country to be free and to live in a democracy."
Cantekin said he thinks what's happening in his country is also important in this state.
"For the people of Utah it is important, because the struggle to create a more free and equal society is a global struggle," he said. "Any struggle in the world for this affects struggles in other places. It creates lessons, and if won, power for the people who are struggling for similar reasons."
