The standoff between the secular part of the Turkish people, brought up in the spirit of Ataturk and the Turkish government has been going on for several days already. It all started because the authorities of Istanbul wanted to destroy one of the few parks in the city to build a shopping complex there instead.
When protesters gathered on the site, police used tear gas against them. The chairman of the Russian Society of Izmir, Andrey Ponomarev, told Pravda.Ru that such measures were not unusual for Turkey at all. Law enforcement agencies very often resort to them during riots.
But what happened next was not a usual development. People in several cities of Turkey began to take to the streets demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mass rallies started across the country over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people took part in them, over 3,000 were injured so far, two people were killed.
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