"The unrest in Turkey continues, but still no one seems to know what is happening. The news is silent, but Twitter and Facebook are so full of stories and pictures that clarity is impossible. I have begun to rely on people who were actually there, but even this can be confusing. Saturday afternoon and the ferry from Kadiköy to Kabatas is crowded. On the docks people wave flags and sing songs. As one ferry arrives, its passengers cheer those waiting to board. Everyone knows the name of everyone else’s destination, or the place they have just come from: Taksim. Quickly the name has spread and at protests across the world it is being held up along side Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park. Children always go where they are told not to. On the ferry, two schoolgirls sit next to me. They are wearing Converse and hoodies, and they both carry backpacks. They refuse the tea offered by the man from the ferry tuckshop, and they never leave their phones alone: but their faces are serious. I wonder what they carry in their bags. All around me people chant words and songs, laugh, share food. A song would start every few minutes, and then end as people carried on talking, carried on swapping phones to share news. Some flags hung over the sides of the boat, but not many. Another ferry full of people - this one with more flags - went by and on both boats the people cheered and shook their fists. Soon it was quiet again. Someone dropped a glass bottle and it smacked the wooden floor loud as a drum. A collective shock twisted the spines of everyone on board: for one second there was silence. It broke into nervous laughter, and someone picked the bottle up. We were close to shore. The walk from Kabatas to Tophane was hot and the pavement was dusty. Along it walked groups of people with surgical masks, some with scarves around their necks. I fell into step with a boy and a girl who had been to Cape Town in February. “A beautiful place,” said the boy. I agreed. The girl stepped into a pharmacy to buy a mask and I walked on. I reached the bottom of Siraseviler Road and turned up into Çihangir. The road is steep and I began to sweat. Wind blew dust into my eyes, and there were people walking past me, their faces blank. A man went by with a black plastic mask - one with two air filters and a covering for his whole head - over one shoulder and a Nikon over the other. His shirt was dark with sweat and he looked at me sidelong but said nothing. I remembered the words of the friend I was walking to meet: be careful on your way here. All that morning and the previous night people had been gathering. The images were iconic the second they were put online: forty thousand souls, maybe fifty thousand, crossing that elegant bridge to join a fight Erdogan had already dismissed as futile. Now, walking up the steep and narrow street, I wondered where those crowds were. Slowly, slowly, I began to see. At an intersection just above a vegan whole food cafe, across the road from a house newly built where construction workers leaned in glassless windows and lit cigarettes, a crowd stood and watched two people coming down the street. One was a woman with a mask askew on her face, the other a man with his arm around her. With his other hand he shielded her face. Cameras were turned to them, phones held up as they passed. The mask on the woman’s face did not hide the blood that flowed from under it. I watched them go and walked on to find my friends. “We need to get you a gas mask,” said Aylin. “Have you got change?” We stepped up to the door of a pharmacy. A boy leaned out and handed me a mask. I passed him some coins. “Birtan?” he said. Just one? Aylin nodded, and we walked on. “Here, this is for your nose. You can squeeze it tight so it fits.” I pull the mask on and we walk on up Siraseviler. And then we are there: in the crowd. Taksim is another ten minutes walk up the hill. The intersection we are at is a collection of narrow roads that wind off into a warren of tea shops, ma-and-pa restaurants and vintage boutiques. It is a comfortable place. It eases you into Istanbul. But there have been cracks beneath the surface of this urban calm for years now, and they have begun to show. It is not a neighbourhood that likes its civil liberties to be infringed. Even more so: it is not a neighbourhood that condones the persecution, limitation and arrest of journalists, writers, artists and students. Here, now, there are teenagers and students, foreign journalists and middle-aged couples, stray dogs and cats. All except the animals are ready for this. Gas masks cover every face; those who do not have sunglasses or goggles have eyes streaming and red. There is gas in the air like mist. The street runs with water. Up ahead the crowd is thicker and I can see a police vehicle indistinctly beyond the waving arms and the few flags. Something is burning. That crowd at the very front is our litmus test, our warning system: every few minutes they surge backwards, shouting, and we all run. The first time a friend grabs my arm and Aylin’s and turns us down the branch of the intersection closest to us. “Run, run, it is the water cannon again.” Around the corner we stop. A minute later, breaths caught, we walk back to the corner. Water streams in the gutters and already the scattered people - hundreds of them - are coming back. The chants pick up again, and up go people’s fists. Again we surge forward, up the street. Outside a Dia supermarket the store owner is leaning against the wall heaving and wiping his face. The police threw a gas canister into the shop. The aisles are thick with it. Quickly this becomes familiar, the sight of people sobbing and crying out for water to soothe the burn in their eyes and throat. Explosions go off up the street. Again we turn and run. This time though the shouts say relax, relax. The gas didn’t reach us that time. A helicopter circles above. Twice, three times it goes past, lower with each circuit. The third time we move under an awning: they have been using helicopters to drop gas bombs. ‘They’ is not vague, here. It is Recip Tayyip Erdogan, his party, and his police. There is little room for ambiguity now, two days after the clashes started. I turn into a pastry shop to change my film. There are men in white uniforms behind the rows of pastries and nougat. In a chair a girl is struggling to breathe and to see. People spray her face with a chalky mixture that neutralizes the gas, but she leans forward coughing and a woman rubs her back. Men with black shirts and black cameras change lenses. Back on the pavement I watch the crowd. It is young, and hip. A girl - and she seems an apparition, an absurd inversion of reality in this heat and chaos - walks by in leopard print tights and solid six-inch heels. A boy helps her put a gas mask on and she checks her hair in a shop window." dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2013-06-07-the-road-to-taksim#.UbGjI9hMFjl
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:15:44 +0000