“I never felt I belonged, as an atheist, non-traditional woman living in Eyüp, Istanbul, and I couldn’t see a happy future for myself there,” Burcum Kesen, who is now studying a Media and Communication Masters at Lund University, in Sweden, tells Equal Times.

This 24-year-old from Istanbul explains that she no longer felt comfortable in her neighbourhood of Eyüp, a conservative Muslim area, on the northwest tip of the Golden Horn. After many coming and goings, she finally left her country with a scholarship in August 2015.

“Women have no place in Turkey. They are discriminated against, continuously harassed and do not have freedom if they do not have certain privileges, such as economic freedom,” adds Kesen.

Feminists were among the diverse mix of people, over three million in total, who protested throughout the country for months, together with ecologists, leftists, the LGBTI community, Kemalists (who advocate, among others, the establishment of a modern, democratic and secular state), and minorities such as Kurds and Alevis. They were, in the main, university students or unemployed people affected by the refugee crisis.

Discontent had started to flare up in 2012, with the conservative policies introduced by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now the president. Among them were taxes on alcohol, the prohibition of demonstrations on Republic Day in October and anti-abortion law plans, followed by the announcement of the then prime minister’s presidential aspirations, the first arrests of well-known figures for supposed offences against Islam and the brutal repression of the May Day rally.

From that moment and for one month, the most liberal terraces around Taksim Square, one of the most touristic and commercial areas of Istanbul, were systematically tear gassed by the police.

 
Peaceful and creative protests

Defenders of the secular republic, established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during the 1920s, were witnessing the tumbling of way of life that had been groundbreaking, even in comparison with certain European countries.

The uniqueness of Turkey, a country straddling Europe and Asia, where the liberal elites have ruled over the Muslim majority for decades, spurred these young people to take to the streets and protest in a peaceful and creative manner.

On 29 May, the first demonstrators began to camp in the central Gezi Park, next to Taksim Square, to protect the few trees in the neighbourhood, which were set to be cut down to make way for a shopping centre.

“The park itself meant a lot to me and I didn’t want it to be demolished. In addition, as a citizen who doesn’t agree with the government’s policies, I was there to protest against the government as well,” recalls Kesen, who left the country in search of a better life, frustrated, she explains, by the rise in conservatism in the wake of the protests.

Gökhan Çoğalırlar was living in the capital, Ankara, when the demonstration and camps began. He would join them when he could, while completing his double major in Translation and International Relations.

“The main reason I left Turkey is because I never felt like I really belonged in the culture or the mentality of the majority,” he tells Equal Times.

This 25-year-old, born and raised in Izmir, left Turkey in August 2015, to do a Masters in Social Sciences, Media and Communication Studies, also in Lund. Çoğalırlar explains that not only does he feel more valued in Sweden, but he also feels safer.

“We are lucky that we are still alive. Any of us could have been killed during any of the bomb attacks there. Considering that I was under an obligation to serve in the army and the fact that there is almost a civil war going on in the southeastern part of Turkey right now and I could have been assigned to any of the troops there as part of my military service, yes, I think the reasons for leaving are growing, as the situation is getting worse and worse every single day,” says the young man.

Turkey’s involvement in the complex horror of the Syrian war and the halting of the peace process with the Kurds since Erdogan lost his absolute majority in the first round of elections in summer 2015 has given way to a de facto civil war in the southeast of the country and almost a dozen suicide attacks in various Turkish cities, which the government has attributed to Islamic State terrorists (and factions close to the PKK).

Almost 200 people were killed in the Suruç and Ankara bombings in July and October, which targeted the peace rallies and demonstrations held by young leftist, secular and Kurdish people – some of the profiles of the Gezi protestors.

“I don’t even want to think how I would feel if I were living in Turkey right now, what kind of psychological condition I would be in if I was still in Ankara,” says Çoğalırlar.

The other attacks, thought to have been staged by radical Islamists, in tourist areas of Istanbul, and the shooting down of a Russian fighter plane at the end of 2015 have left the already waning economy in more than bad shape with the impact on tourism.

“I think the overwhelming feeling is one of desperation. Not only in Turkey but also in the different places where Turkish people are studying abroad. Almost all of them took part in Gezi,” says Umut Özkirimli, professor at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Lund, to where he move before the protests, in 2011, in an interview with Equal Times.

 
Political censorship, lack of hope, lack of labour opportunities...

For the academic, the reasons for this desperation include: “Political censorship, lack of hope, lack of labour opportunities, the restrictions on freedom of the press and freedom of expression, and the crackdown on academia.”

In addition to these, there is the resumption of the Kurdish conflict, compulsory military service, the allocation of senior positions to supporters of the regime and the brutality of the conflict in Syria, which has led almost three million refugees to flock to Turkey.

Forty-five-year-old Özkirimli says he could no longer go back to his country given that his political comments on Twitter, where he has over 23,000 followers, could put him behind bars, as has been the case with other academics and journalists over recent months.

“Now I have political problems in Turkey, but not because I did anything. You become an activist if you deal with politics,” explains the professor, who has been analysing the Gezi movement from afar.

Although there are no statistics on the diaspora, Özkirimli points out that when he first moved to Sweden he would receive one or two requests a week from Turkish citizens wishing to study in the Scandinavian country. Now he is receiving three times that amount.

Çoğalırlar, who is studying in Sweden, says that almost 80 per cent of his friends in Turkey have either left or are planning to leave the country. There were around ten Turkish citizens on the campus when he reached there in August 2015 and fifteen more have arrived since then.

The Gezi protestors were a minority when they took to the streets, but they were not aware of it. The wake-up call came when some ten people, mostly Alevis, were killed at the hands of the police, and the local elections of that summer once again gave an absolute majority to Erdogan’s party.

According to the most recent election results, the ‘Gezi generation’ represents no more than 7 per cent of the population (the 3.5 million who demonstrated), whilst those supporting Erdogan’s Islamic conservative party, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) represents a monolithic, conservative bloc of almost half a population of 80 million inhabitants. A bloc that gave Erdogan once again the absolute majority in the second round of voting last November.

The secular opposition is composed of the liberal nationalists of the CHP (Republican People’s Party, with 20 to 25 per cent); the far-right nationalists of the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party, with 12 per cent), and the left-wing liberals, feminists, LGBTs and Kurds gathered by the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), which, led by the charismatic Selahattin Demirtas, succeeded in winning parliamentary representation for the Kurds for the first time.

Although the Gezi movement generated the largest protest in the history of the Republic and the eight centuries of Ottoman rule, and has parallels with the Indignados in Spain or the Occupy movement, the Turks did not realise that there were relatively few of them, perhaps owing to the polarisation intrinsic within Turkey.

“There was a lack of awareness that they were a minority,” explains Özkirimli. “They were young, inexperienced. They didn’t sleep for seven days, they were operating on adrenaline. It was highly romanticized, which is completely natural. But to unite this sentiment you need some kind of Podemos, like in Spain, or a Syriza, like in Greece. The HDP, led by Demirtas, could have fulfilled this role, but the conflict with the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party, considered to be a terrorist group) has made that impossible,” adds the academic.

 
... and diaspora

As young people abandon the country with scholarships, the recent deal between the EU and Turkey contemplates visa-free travel for Turks subject to a variety of conditions, which the academic thinks will not be met.

“That’s bullshit, visa exemption for Turks... The government is playing on this and its supporters are so ignorant… Eighty million Turks free to travel to Europe without a visa. Just one country blocking the proposal will be enough to stop it, and there will be several. They are trying to get rid of the refugees, and how? By offering visa-free entry to 80 million? The Europeans are just buying time,” considers Özkirimli.

Although some years ago Turkey still aspired to join the European Union, the situation is worsening and the abyss is growing ever wider as IS attacks spread across Europe and the flow of refugees increases. Brussels blames Ankara for not stopping them, Ankara blames Brussels for not accepting them.

“[The German chancellor Angela] Merkel makes me nauseous. It [the deal] is really hypocritical. The people who are living in the West are used to standards of democracy and they don’t understand how Sweden or Germany could support such a deal,” adds the academic. “Who know what will happen between now and June”, when the proposal to put Turkey on the visa-free list is due to be adopted.

Border restrictions and the fear of feeling rejected, as Muslim Turks, in Europe, represent an obstacle for Gezi protestors. But there are also idealists who want to keep fighting in their country.

“No I haven’t thought about leaving the country. Because these lands are where I grew up, and these are the people with whom I talk the same language with whom I share the same problems and with whom I can solve those problems,” a 30-year-old anarchist who joined the Gezi protests because it “it was what had to be done”, tells Equal Times on the condition of anonymity.

She was working as a housekeeper and cleaner at the time, as well as volunteering at the 26A anarchist collective cafe in Taksim, and writing for the alternative news site Meydan. Just days before the protest, she and the rest of her “comrades from the café and newspaper”, had turned the café in Taksim into an infirmary, a communal kitchen and provided places to rest or sleep in the park, where revolutionary songs rang out from speakers, including Hasta Siempre Comandante sung in Spanish by the Turkish band Grup Yorum.

Our anonymous source is now the mother of a 20-month-old baby and she continues to work with Meydan.

“We were already in the streets protesting against the subcontracting of workers, against the looting of nature and life, against patriarchy, we were already in the struggle to achieve a social revolution. Our hopes and expectations were there long before Gezi, and take their roots from the Ukrainian communes of the Makhnovists, the free collectives of Spain during the revolution in 1936, the peoples who used to have no masters, stateless communities who live in harmony. So Gezi was not a brand new hope for us. But to be honest, we weren’t expecting such a big movement,” she adds.

She tells Equal Times that none of her friends want to leave. They want to carry on with their political struggles, despite the ever-growing repression. Her hope is that these policies will ultimately backfire on the current government.

“In the future, I think these politics will bite back. The people will call into question this repression and these murders... Every dictator vanishes when the time comes,” insists the anarchist, who hopes to see renewed protests.

But it will not be another Gezi, she reassures, “because many mistakes were made and we have learned from that experience”.