Istanbul was rocked by a violent police crackdown Friday when Turkish police moved in on the thousands of demonstrators who have been protesting in a downtown park since Monday. Reuters reports that police fired tear gas and a water cannon at protesters in Gezi Park around dawn; 100 sustained minor injuries. But if some of the messages circulating on social networks are any indication, the so-called occupiers may persist, even now that the park is clear: more than 61,000 tweets have been sent with the hashtag #geziparkı, and photos and videos from the crackdown are trending worldwide. In fact, as of 11 a.m. on Friday, five of the 11 trending terms on Twitter related to the protests.
As protests have rocked Turkey over the past few days, three Turkish professionals in the U.S. decided on Sunday that they had to take some action. Turning to their technology backgrounds, the trio launched a crowd-sourced fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to buy a full-page ad in the front section of the New York Times in support of their fellow Turkish citizens who’ve clashed with the government across dozens of cities. In just a matter of hours, they’d jump-started the fastest major politics funding campaigns in Indiegogo’s history.
Almost 1,000 people were detained in more than 90 protests held across the country, as Catharina Moh reports. Turkish police have arrested more than 900 people during two days of protests, the most sustained anti-government outburst for years. Interior Minister Muammer Guler said some of those arrested had since been released, others would be put on trial. He said 26 police officers and 53 civilians had been hurt, one of them seriously. Protests flared after police cracked down on a peaceful sit-in against a plan to redevelop a park in Istanbul.
ISTANBUL — Tens of thousands of protesters called for the resignation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and fought police firing tear gas in central Istanbul for the second day Saturday. A defiant Erdogan declared he would not back down from a controversial construction project that set off the protests, but then called off the police. Denouncing protesters as “entirely ideological,” Erdogan vowed in a speech to go ahead with plans to build a replica of an Ottoman-era barracks on what is now parkland off of Taksim Square in the heart of Istanbul’s downtown. But he conceded there had been excessive use of tear gas and that citizens had the right to express their views.
