It is Spring in Istanbul

Tulips dance beside the walkways and spill down the hillsides. The air is fragrant with the rose and lavender and magenta blossoms that veil the trees. And the breeze is filled with the sharp scent of tear gas.

It is spring. Clouds of gas blanket the streets of Ankara and Istanbul, and the people’s eyes fill with tears. They cry for 15-year-old Berkin Elvan who is dead from a head injury caused by a gas canister fired by riot police last June. And the people wail, and they shake angry fists, and they hurl street pavers as they cry and scream behind damp bandanas that hide their faces.  

It is spring in Turkey. It is the anniversary of the Taksim Square protests. Crowds gather in the sunshine, beside the tulips, beneath the reddened boughs. They gather in outrage. They gather to decry a prime minister hell bent on turning their modern secular nation into an oppressive Islamic state. They sacrifice their bodies, their livelihoods and their children to protest Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s repression and corruption. 

But Erdoğan does not hear them. He is not listening. His police pummel the people with water cannons, and the people of the Republic of Turkey tumble like so much trash down their city streets. Erdoğan’s gas fills the streets, and again this spring, perhaps, Turkey’s citizens will crawl to shelter in the lobbies of Istanbul’s atmospheric hotels, crying, coughing, and dying.

And Erdoğan again will be unmoved. He will be steadfast, safe in the certainty that the great, the powerful, the United States will not abandon him. For, whatever he does, Erdoğan is Turkey, and Turkey is always and forever the stalwart “best friend” of the United States amid the tumult that is the Middle East. 

It is spring in Istanbul. The people are crying. And no one seems to care. (SR/BM)

* Susan Dente Ross, Professor, Washington State University