As widespread unrest breaks out in Istanbul and Ankara for the first time since Gezi Park, we ask what has become of children’s rights in Turkey
Protests in SOAS
LONDON saw fresh demonstrations against the Turkish government following the death on Tuesday of a boy who had been wounded in last summer’s protests.
Members of the Turkish-speaking communities were in Trafalgar Square on Tuesday night to protest the death of Berkin Elvan, 15, who was struck on the head by a teargas canister fired by police last June.
He had been in a coma for 269 days.
The London demonstrators marched from Trafalgar Square towards the British prime minister’s residence on Downing Street.
TUBE PROTESTS
The protests focused on Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AK Party government, also came in the form of posters hung up on trains serving the London Underground Piccadilly line.
“Wanted”, the posters read beneath the prime minister’s picture, “for the murder of #BerkinElvan, a 14-year old boy in Istanbul. Extremely dangerous!”
Posters on the London Underground
Students at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), supported by the Day-Mer pressure group, staged a seated protest on Wednesday morning outside the main entrance. Their banners carried Berkin’s face and quotations associated with Berkin.
Some were seen to carry loaves of bread, which Berkin’s father said his son had left the house to buy when he was struck by a police teargas cannister on 16 June 2013.
Loaves of bread were also left by protesters outside the Turkish embassy in Belgrave Square.
Smaller protests were also reported in Oxford, Bournemouth and Manchester.
TURKISH UNREST
The protests mirrored demonstrations in Turkey, where the news of Berkin’s death after a nine-month coma triggered the worst unrest seen in the country since last summer’s Gezi Park protests.
Crowds chanted “Tayyip! Killer!” and “Everywhere is Berkin, everywhere is resistance” as they held up photos of the 15-year-old at his Istanbul funeral on Wednesday.
His coffin, draped in red and covered in flowers, was through the streets of the Okmeydanı district for a traditional Alevi burial.
Afterwards, protesters hurled fireworks behind police lines. Hundreds of people ended up taking refuge in a shopping centre and the lobby of a hotel as more tear gas and pepper spray was fired by police.
There were similar protests in Ankara, with clashes at the Middle East Technical University and in the central Kızılay district.
The boy’s father, Sami Elvan, told the BBC’s Newshour programme that his son had become a “child of the people”.
Asked how he would like him to be remembered, he said: “I want him to be known as a child killed by the state. He was just an innocent boy killed when he went out to buy bread.”
