I learned a new word in French today: intru­sion.  Not to be con­fused with per­fu­sion, although there’s a hos­pi­tal involved.


Français | English

From which, dear French friends, I see you have a Min­is­ter of the Inte­ri­or who could apply for a job with Erdoğan.

Hold on, I’ll tell you all about it.

First, we must go back to 2013. Five years ago already when what we sim­ply called Gezi was in full swing, involv­ing its opponents.

A brief sum­ma­ry for those who don’t know what this was about. On May 28 2013 in Istan­bul, some fifty peo­ple began a sit-in in a park near Tak­sim, as a protest against the planned dis­ap­pear­ance of the park and the begin­ning of the cut­ting down of the trees. Res­i­dents came at first, soon joined by a few ecol­o­gy activists.

The urban renew­al project planned for this area com­bined a shop­ping cen­ter and the recon­struc­tion of bar­racks from the Ottoman peri­od. A con­densed and high­ly sym­bol­i­cal sum­ma­ry of the Erdoğan régime, Istan­bul’s for­mer may­or and soon-to-be President.

Of course the police forces in 2013 were not manned by lovey-dovey types and the whole busi­ness end­ed with beat­ings and expul­sion of the demon­stra­tors. This sav­age repres­sion led to the move­ment spread­ing across Turkey, with demands against the regime falling like ripe fruit from tree branch­es. It was some­thing of our ’68. And it went on, from one demon­stra­tion to anoth­er repression…

By June 6 2013, six peo­ple had died and more than 4 000 demon­stra­tors, includ­ing 14 jour­nal­ists, had been wound­ed. In France on the 8 o’clock news bul­letin of June 6 2013, you heard about “unease and sui­cides among the police­men”…Oh? Yes, ver­ba­tim, I checked! The least I can say about this is that you were already so fix­at­ed on your red-white-and-blue navel that an upris­ing cov­er­ing a large part of Turkey with over 640 000 par­tic­i­pants did­n’t hold much of  the atten­tion of your left-wingers. We’re still wait­ing for the tweet express­ing support…

For those wish­ing more details, I refer you to the learned web.

Let’s get back to our sim­ple tale of a hos­pi­tal mak­ing fun of a mosque…

Under the wise guid­ance of the gov­ern­ment, a good num­ber of the media had ban­ner head­lines read­ing:“Intrud­ers attacked a Mosque in the heart of Istan­bul”. And the sto­ries con­tained spicy details con­cern­ing this intrusion.

A bunch of tchapould­jous (mean­ing maraud­ers, drifters) entered the mosque  in their shoes, where they drank and for­ni­cat­ed!” In fact, the imam of a mosque had opened the doors to demon­stra­tors attacked by the police. Many wound­ed ones were treat­ed there by vol­un­teer doc­tors and nurses.

So you can well imag­ine that when I heard about the fake news being spread around by your “Inte­ri­or chest thumper”, I was imme­di­ate­ly remind­ed of this. And I told myself right away that, beside being inven­tive, your Min­is­ter was a pla­gia­rist. Unless there exists an Inter­na­tion­al of Lies when it comes to dis­parag­ing your oppo­si­tions. If you don’t believe me, look at this! (in French +video inside)

And once you know where such repres­sions led us, for the sake of some hold­ing on to pow­er,  you know you can nev­er be too cautious.

Ah, Gezi… A failed upris­ing, also a betrayed one.  An intru­sion of a promise of change in Turkey. It will soon be its fifth anniver­sary. Five years of tears and blood  have flowed since then.


Translation by Renée Lucie Bourges
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