Two weeks into nationwide anti-government protests, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally met with demonstrators’ representatives late on Thursday night in an apparent bid to seek compromise on a controversial plan to redevelop a center city park that sparked the unrest. As talks began, police and demonstrators clashed in the capital Ankara, while in Istanbul thousands of protesters defied official warnings to pack into Gezi Park, the occupied epicenter of their movement. Erdogan said that Gezi Park would remain as it is until a court ruling on whether a plan to raze it and replace it with a faux Ottoman-era barracks and commercial development is lawful. The gesture was largely symbolic since the government is in any case required by law to uphold court rulings on a case brought by environmentalists trying to stop the redevelopment scheme. The park, a rare pocket of green space in crowded downtown Istanbul, is a cultural and natural heritage site, activists argue. It was the most conciliatory Erdogan has been in the two weeks since protests first broke out in response to a violent police crackdown on peaceful activists in Gezi Park on May 28. He previously dismissed protestors as vandals, extremists and part of an international conspiracy to undermine Turkey. But that hardline approach has hurt Erdogan’s standing abroad—with many linking his heavy-handed behavior to that of the ousted Arab autocrats he decried during 2011′s Arab Spring upheavals—and slowed the economy. If the court ruled in favor of the project, he told a group of artists and protesters’ representatives, the government would put the issue to an Istanbul-wide referendum. But he also told protesters to clear the park. And whether his offer would appease the largely youthful crowd of demonstrators—who have spent two weeks encamped there in tough conditions, withstanding clouds of tear gas—was uncertain. Many are still chafing at police violence—three people died in the Istanbul protests and thousands have been wounded, mostly with tear gas-related injuries. “We basically thought we were going to die here in the park,” says Tekin Deniz,![]()
