ISTANBUL: Turkish protest leaders headed into emergency talks with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday after demonstrators rejected his “last warning” to evacuate an Istanbul park at the centre of mass anti-government demos.
Thousands of defiant protesters readied for another night under the stars in Gezi Park after rebuffing Erdogan’s olive branch to clear out in return for a referendum on the park’s planned redevelopment.
“We will stay in Gezi Park with all our demands and sleeping bags,” Taksim Solidarity, the core group behind the campaign, said in a statement.
The fight to save the park’s 600 trees prompted a brutal police crackdown two weeks ago, snowballing into nationwide demos against Erdogan and his Islamic-rooted government, seen as increasingly authoritarian.
With tensions mounting, representatives of the group later headed to Ankara for emergency talks with the premier at 2000 GMT, their first since the unrest began.
Earlier, Erdogan took a combative stance against the park protesters who have thrown up the biggest challenge yet to the decade-long rule of his Justice and Development Party (AKP).
“I’m making my last warning: mothers, fathers please withdraw your kids from there,” the premier said in a live television broadcast. “Gezi Park does not belong to occupying forces. It belongs to everybody.”
Four people have died in the nationwide unrest so far and some 5,000 of the demonstrators, most of whom are young and middle-class, have been injured.
Erdogan on Wednesday made his first concession yet by suggesting a popular vote on plans to build a replica of Ottoman-era military barracks in Gezi Park.
The proposal came out of talks with some protest leaders, a loose coalition representing a variety of interest groups, but to the dismay of many protesters the Taksim Solidarity representatives were not invited to that meeting, hardening campers’ resolve to stay in the park.
“We did not suffer through the attacks... so that a referendum could take place,” the Taksim Solidarity group said.
In some of the biggest clashes in the conflict yet, riot police on Tuesday stormed Taksim Square, which borders Gezi Park and had been the focal point of the protest movement. Police fired tear gas and jets of water at tens of thousands of demonstrators, some of whom hurled back fireworks and Molotov cocktails. AFP
