Justice and Development

"These protests have the potential to seriously damage Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's political ambitions less than three weeks ahead of the critical local elections on 30 March."
Wolfango Piccoli, managing director, political risk analyst Teneo Intelligence

Marchers in Ankara hold pictures of Berkin Elvan and his mother on Wednesday. The teen's death has sparked widespread protests in Turkey. AFP/Getty Images

Sometimes it takes one single isolated incident out of a series of vicious assaults on people protesting the oppressive governments they live under, to motivate people to further entrench themselves in resistance to an authority grown too rigidly authoritarian, expressing values that fail to reflect those of the people being governed. It is not often assaults by authorities taking the initiative to impact on hordes of protesters, but rather a single event that takes the life of one young, uninvolved innocent.

During the Iranian Green Movement, when mass protests came out on the streets of Tehran to protest against a manipulated presidential election returning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, it was the death of a young woman, an innocent bystander, Neda Agha-Soltan, killed by a Basij sniper's bullet, that had a galvanizing effect on the protest movement, and led to sympathy for their plight on the international scene. In the event, the Ayatollahs were too powerful and the movement went underground.

Turkey's Islamist government, unsurprisingly, has much in common with the Iranian mullahs, both intent on ensuring their respective countries remain deeply conservative in 'traditional' Islam with full sharia law imposed on the land. Turkey has not yet totally moved itself from its former long-established state of secularism brought about by Kemal Ataturk which Erdogan has slowly reversed over a decade in power. It has gained a reputation, however, as the country whose repression of journalists is the worst on record.

But it has not yet been revealed as one that arrests its dissenting citizens en masse, for torture and state murder, like Iran which stands out for the huge numbers of Iranians who have been killed through capital punishment for crimes against the state. Where homosexuality can be cured by incarceration, torture and death. And worshiping a religion other than Islam can be viewed as a crime against Islam.

In Turkey's most recent clashes, crowds of mourners following the funeral of a Turkish teen who died nine months after he was hit by a police tear gas canister during anti-government protests while he was innocently out on a shopping errand, found themselves targeted by riot police. Police fired water cannon, and tear gas to halt the thousands of mourners intending to reach Istanbul's main square.

A demonstrator holds up a poster of Berkin Elvan, which reads: " For Berkin, for Justice", during a protest in Ankara March 11, 2014. (Photo : Reuters) 

Mourners chanted "Berkin Elvan is immortal" (for the 15-year-old boy who had been in a coma for nine months). "Government resign!", and "Murderer Tayyip". That takes courage. The building of the ruling party had stones hurled at its windows. Protests in Ankara and in Izmir were also met with tear gas and water canon. Erdogan is held responsible since he sanctioned the crackdown on the protests that swept Turkey during the summer, praising police as heroes. Those clashes resulted in the death of eight people altogether.

Turkish police use water cannons on protesters Wednesday during Berkin Elvan's funeral. The teen's death sparked the biggest antigovernment protests since June. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Erdogan's reputation as an incorruptible politician has suffered a blow lately, as a police investigation revealed that allegations of corruption in his government and by him and his son were no mere fables. His telephone was tapped, as was that of some of his cabinet ministers, implicating them in large-scale corruption, gaining them millions in personal revenues.

Erdogan himself has been implicated in ferrying illegal funding to Iran, circumventing the sanctions imposed by the international community relating to Iran's nuclear program. His taped conversations with his son revealed him instructing how best to secret illegally got financial gains in the millions. Turks are howling for justice.

In response he has removed police and prosecutors in their hundreds from key positions in an effort to hold back investigations into corruption by his administration. His earlier charges against top military officials in the Turkish military led to their trials on trumped-up charges of attempting to overturn his Justice and Development party from government for which they were found guilty and given life imprisonment.

The true colours of Erdogan's human-rights-abusing government and its full investment in corruption are now coming into full view.