Policed bodies and subjectivities: Football fans at the Gezi Uprising in Turkey
Küçük Resim Yok
Tarih
2018
Yazarlar
Dergi Başlığı
Dergi ISSN
Cilt Başlığı
Yayıncı
Taylor and Francis
Erişim Hakkı
info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
Özet
On September 15, 2015, I exited the Istanbul metro, toward one of the city’s most famous and frequented pedestrian avenues, the İstiklal Avenue. It was around 8:30 PM and I was on my way to meet colleagues for dinner. As I joined İstiklal Avenue from a side street, I saw a bottleneck ahead. I broke free of the crowd and got ready to spring forward when I noticed that a police barrier had blocked the entire width of the avenue. Four or five lines of policemen stood there expressionless, facing demonstrators who had occupied a section of the avenue. They wore helmets and other protective gear, and were armed with rubber bullet guns. One civilian standing near the blockade told me that I had go around the other side of the police to walk up the avenue. I glanced at the demonstrators; some were sitting on the ground, others not. Rubbing shoulders with the policemen at the edge of the blockade, I saw a water cannon parked behind the troops. I made eye contact with a couple of them after which I instantly averted my gaze only to find it stuck on the policemen’s back pockets where their batons hung. I hurried past them, anxious to tell my colleagues what I had just witnessed. I realized I did not even know what the demonstration was about until one of my colleagues asked me about it (I would later learn that it was a congregation of lawyers protesting the recent surge of police and military violence against Kurdish civilians and guerilla in Cizre, Şırnak). When I told him I did not know, he said, “It makes no difference anyway, this is the reality of everyday life now, in this country.” My colleague was right in diagnosing the elevated presence of police on İstiklal Avenue as an everyday condition for Istanbul. This has been the case especially since the Gezi Uprising of summer 2013 when a peaceful sit-in to protest the demolition of a public park spontaneously turned into a full-fledged uprising.1 After a few nights of sit-ins in the park, the night of May 31, 2013 saw the first of the violent police attacks against the protestors when the park was raided by riot police. During this raid the police burned tents, sprayed protestors with water from pressurized water cannons and tear-gassed the entire neighborhood. Amnesty International (2013a) called these actions “gross human rights violations” and the “brutal denial of the right to peaceful assembly” (Amnesty International 2013b). From May 31 onward, Gezi spread to the rest of the city and to the country as millions joined to demonstrate. The uprising lasted for the whole summer and included approximately 5,500 demonstrations across the country, mobilizing nearly 3.5 million people (Bellaigue 2013). While there are no official statistics in relation to the number of detentions, arrests or casualties, various sources indicate that more than 5,500 protestors were detained (Yağmur 2014), close to 200 people were arrested (Milliyet 2013), eight protestors were killed and nearly 8,000 were injured (Letsch 2014). The motivations to join Gezi were manifold but centered on dissatisfaction regarding the neoliberal and neoconservative policies of the government aimed at controlling relations in increasingly more aspects of social life. Indeed, Gezi was an inclusive movement, accommodating many sectors of society including university students, leftist youths and union representatives, Alevis (a religious minority in Turkey, sometimes referred to as the “Shiites of Anatolia”), Kurds, non-Muslims, anti-capitalist Muslims, Turkish nationalists, secularists, women’s rights activists, LGBTI communities, animal rights activists, environmentalists and football fans.2. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Kevin G. Karpiak and William Garriott; individual chapters, the contributors.
Açıklama
Anahtar Kelimeler
Kaynak
The Anthropology of Police
WoS Q Değeri
Scopus Q Değeri
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