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When the Gezi Park demonstration expanded into nationwide protests against Prime Minister Erdogan and his style of rule, there was an effort by Mr. Erdogan’s government to paint the protesters as Kemalists wanting a return to the old ways. Many Kurds seemed appeared weary of supporting the protests because they too wondered if these were the “old guard” staging a revolt to regain the ascendancy in Turkey.
Some of my Kurdish friends exclaimed, “Where were all these people and their protests when were being repressed in the streets of Diyarbakir, Tunceli, Sirnak, Van and Hakkari? It’s time they got a taste of tear gas, pepper spray, Tomas [special riot control vehicles used in Turkey], beatings and bullets.” Apparently when some of the Toma riot control vehicle reinforcements sent to Istanbul at the height of the protests were returned to Turkish Kurdistan, Kurds there held up signs declaring “Welcome Home Toma” (“Evine Hoşgeldin Toma”).
By most accounts, however, Turkey’s protests against Mr. Erdogan are not “the return of the Kemalists.” A good thing too, since sequels are never as good as the original. Surveys of protestors showed that some 80% of people taking to the streets against Mr. Erdogan were against a military coup to remove him from power. Half of them had never been to a protest before. Some 70% did not feel aligned with any political party. Over 90% felt the protests were happening because of the Prime Minister’s authoritarian behaviour, police brutality and violations of democratic rights. Around 84% thought the Turkish media’s self-censorship and subservience to Mr. Erdogan’s government brought people out into the streets as well. Only 64.5% of the three thousand protesters who were surveyed described themselves as “secular,” however, while 81.2% self-identified as “libertarian.”
Some of my Kurdish friends exclaimed, “Where were all these people and their protests when were being repressed in the streets of Diyarbakir, Tunceli, Sirnak, Van and Hakkari? It’s time they got a taste of tear gas, pepper spray, 
Some of the most interesting things that emerged from the protests involved the coexistence of different kinds of people. In contrast to the baseless stories of “our veiled sisters being attacked by capulcu” stories Mr. Erdogan was telling his supporters, we saw veiled women side by side with western, “secular looking” types. Alevis stood beside Sunnis. Perhaps most surprisingly, Kurdish nationalists ended up shoulder to shoulder with Kemalists and their traditional Turkish nationalist opponents. One popular photo shows a woman wearing a PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) flag standing next to another woman wearing a Turkish flag emblazoned with a portrait of Kemal Ataturk. Who would have thought this was possible?
From accounts I heard, many western Turks experienced an awakening of sorts during these protests. “We saw the government lying and the media refusing to show the reality of what was happening on the street,” they said. “We saw the police and their civilian clothes officers attacking unarmed, peaceful people and beating them without provocation, after which the Prime Minister and other officials would congratulate the security forces for their heroism. For the first time, we now can believe, and even understand a bit, what was really happening to the Kurds in this country for so many years. We had never been east of Cappodocia before, and we believed what the media and government told us then.”
As I heard about these awakenings, I marveled to myself: In just a few short weeks, Prime Minister Erdogan and some of the more brutal members of his police force may have done more to unify Western and Eastern Turkey than anyone else ever did. How wonderful it would be to see more of a new kind of Kemalism, a Turkish nationalism that is genuinely accepting of others, emerge from this.
At the same time, however, the new Islamism we heard so much about in Turkey under Mr. Erdogan’s AKP – or more exactly, the “moderate Muslim identity politics” – looks less and less like something new. It is, in fact, looking like the very opposite of the Gezi Park protests. Now that the army is safely imprisoned in its barracks (or jail cells in many cases), the “new” Islamists feel increasingly comfortable busying themselves with legislation against alcohol and other displays of “immorality,” mandatory religion classes for everyone, rebuilding an Ottoman barracks famous for a reactionary religious revolt, naming a new Bosporous bridge after Sultan Selim “the Grim” who massacred tens of thousands of Alevis, and other pressing matters. Perhaps most revealing are the conspiracy theories, especially those focusing on Jews (although the telekinesis plot to kill Mr. Erdogan is also very entertaining, as told on television in all seriousness by Yigit Bulut, his new chief advisor). Somehow it always comes back to anti-semitism for the real Islamists, as if they can not live without this kind of bile nourishing them.
Soon no doubt we will hear about Jewish telekinetic zombie birds out to destroy Turkey.
In the past two weeks, we heard about a kestrel (a kind of little bird) with an Israeli scientific tracking tag on it that was found in Turkey and immediately accused of being an Israeli spy by alert AKP officials. The dark rantings from Mr. Erdogan and his friends about the Jewish diaspora and the “interest rate lobby” (pretty much the same thing in this way of thinking) conspiring against Turkey continued unabated. As Brad Pitt’s zombie thriller “World War Z” began playing in Turkish cinemas, all references to Israel (where many scenes in the film and book upon which it is based explicitly take place) were eliminated in the Turkish subtitles.
Soon no doubt we will hear about Jewish telekinetic zombie birds out to destroy Turkey. Anything is possible, I suppose, now that we have seen Kemalists and PKK supporters demonstrating arm-in-arm against the Turkish government...
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).
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