June 21, 2013, 6:51 amComment The Civics of Civility By ANDREW FINKEL
Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse Getty Images ISTANBUL I have two ready answers when Im asked why Ive lived in Istanbul all these years. The first is that Im enamored of the city itself: the history of the skyline, the blue expanse of the Bosporus, my neighborhood of wooden houses along a central promenade. The second is that I admire the civility of everyday life here. I enjoy nodding to people on the street, the animated conversations in the shops, the kindness of locals toward someone who was born elsewhere. Yet for some time I had been fending off the suspicion that these two explanations are incompatible that I live in a city so well behaved it is incapable of raising more than a polite cough to protest its own destruction.
In London, environmentalists and community activists have managed for an entire decade to stall the construction of a third runway at Heathrow airport. But when the central government in faraway Ankara announced its intention to build a third airport with six runways in Istanbul, the news was treated here as a fait accompli. This city has a famously low rate of crime against the person, yet it has long looked the other way when it comes to crimes against the environment. But all that has changed recently. For many years I shared an office overlooking a patch of green in the inner city, and during that time I didnt even register it had a name other than the bit of green off Taksim Square. I dont ever remember sitting there to eat a lunchtime sandwich; it had no inviting air. Now the whole world knows it as Gezi Park and the site, for three weeks, of pitched battles between protesters and the police. At the end of May, something snapped, and the campaign to save Taksims trees became a campaign to change the country. In February 2012, I did tag along to a protest meeting against a scheme to develop the park and cut down its trees. But that demonstration didnt strike me as an example of a city awakening from its slumber: There were few people and far too many were my friends. What hope was there, I remember thinking, for a movement to stop the construction of a third Bosporus bridge, a behemoth that would pave the way for unthrottled conurbation, the devastation of an important habitat and the destruction of over two million trees? At the end of May, something snapped, and the campaign to save Taksims trees became a campaign to change the country. And now the near-universal consensus about that mess is that, with their reckless brutality, the authorities stoked the very unrest they were hoping to quell. The human rights lawyer Orhan Kemal Cengiz has estimated the final toll from the violence: Four people were killed and 7,822 were
wounded. Eleven people lost their eyesight when the capsules of gas projectiles hit their eyes. Six people are fighting for their lives in intensive care. Tens of thousands of people who participated in the protests inhaled the gas fired by the police. Thousands were detained. Istanbul, though it is bent out of shape, is slowly returning to normal. There are no more angry protests in neighborhood parks, just community meetings. Demonstrators show their colors not with banners and gas masks but by standing at dignified attention until the police or their aching limbs tell them to move on. And for now, the plane trees of Gezi Park are safe. The national government has said it will respect a court order that protects the park pending final official approval of the developers plan. The municipality, acting like a guilty child, has been planting flowers in the park and even a few more trees. And in a perverse upside of the crisis, the markets have been rattled which means that the government will find it much more difficult to finance its cherished development projects, including finding all those billions for that third airport. Andrew Finkel Previous Posts
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Yet we all fear a crackdown. The prime minister has muttered that he will extract a heavy price from those who supported the protests, and there are threats to regulate the tweets that went on behind his back. Meanwhile, many Turks remain mobilized and largely because they have seen their government behave with less decency than they expect of themselves.
All of which is to say that I was wrong to call into question my reasons for loving living here. Whatever gains are made in the battle to save Istanbul will be made because of, not despite, the basic civility of its people.
