This is the second anniversary of the Gezi Resistance, which started as a reaction to the uprooting of trees in the public’s Gezi Park for the construction of a shopping mall and to the violent police attack on people using their democratic right of protest two years ago. The government, desperate for more profit, chose to suppress the objections of those willing to defend their city and commons. During the resistance that began with a public indignation, 8 young people were killed, 11 citizens lost their eyes, countless injuries, arrests and traumas were experienced.
Since then, the government’s attitude has been in the direction of legitimising police violence and there have been no improvements on the state’s attitude towards its own citizens. Even more, the domestic security package increased the authorities of the police, going beyond persistence on making the same mistake.
It is now a futile effort to antagonise the people’s protests that burst out in the Gezi Resistance and their will to claim to their labour, parks, trees, rivers, water, to the air they breathe, to their lives and rights. Government’s othering discourse against the Gezi Resistance, its attempt to polarize the public through Gezi, is to no avail except to bring its corrupt ruling mechanism into open. Our fellow citizens get to know more about this web of bribery, favouring, discrimination, hate discourse and black propaganda and the legitimacy of this structure is eroded day by day.
Gezi Resistance was a reaction against government’s giving away people’s commons to partisan capitalist circles, against the corruption of ecological balance, against urban transformation based on profit. Gezi Resistance was a democracy call with a stress on local democracy and the diverse opposition it revealed opened a proud page in our social, urban and democracy history, gave millions of citizens hope for the future.
What happened during and in the aftermath of Gezi Resistance was a representation of the history of state violence against the society. The Gezi Park Resistance will continue to shed a light for all the sections of the society on their way of building a democratic future together.
We will neither forget, nor let it be forgotten, the lives we lost at the struggles of labor, freedom and democracy in Gezi Resistance, Rojova, Roboski, mines, worksites and factories.
HDP Central Executive Commitee
31 May 2015