The Turkish prime minister has issued a call for people to ignore calls for protests to mark the first anniversary of anti-government demonstrations. Last year’s unrest posed one of the biggest threats to the more than decade-long rule of the Turkish prime minister.

Twenty-five-thousand police backed by 50 water cannon trucks and helicopters have been deployed in Istanbul to prevent any repeat of last year’s anti-government demonstrations. There have been calls for nationwide protests by civic groups and trade unions to mark the first anniversary of the unrest.

Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a Friday address slammed the demonstrators and warned the young not to get involved.

He said one year later, people, including "so-called" artists are calling for demonstrations, but he said Turkey's youth will not respond to the call.

The brutal eviction by police of a handful of environmentalists protecting Istanbul’s Gezi Park from government plans to turn it into a shopping mall sparked last year’s civic unrest. The protests quickly evolved into broader discontent against the government and, in particular the prime minister, spreading to nearly every city in Turkey. But "ground zero" was Gezi Park and the adjacent Taksim Square where for a few weeks last year, it became the focus of the world’s attention, as theatre director Mehmet Ergen recalls.

"It was very emotional when I saw tens of thousands of people marching towards Taksim," said Ergen. "It’s an awakening more than anything else."

Observers say what set the Gezi protests apart from previous unrest was that most people who participated were made up of the country’s educated young, and until then, largely non-political middle class.  

Political scientist Cengiz Aktar of the Istanbul Political Centre says even though there has not been a repeat on the same scale of the protests, for Erdogan, Aktar still sees it as the prime minister's biggest threat to his rule.

"The official opposition is nothing for him. But he still fears Gezi; this type of protest without political colors and without well-defined political leadership is not controllable," he said. "He hates this; he demonizes Gezi just because of that."

Throughout the Gezi protests and its aftermath, the prime minister has insisted it was an international conspiracy against him. Since the Gezi unrest, security forces have been cracking down heavily on any protests. The government has introduced sweeping legislation extending the powers of its intelligence agency and controlling the Internet; all steps seen at preventing and containing any major outbreak of unrest. Such moves have fueled allegations from his critics of authoritarianism.

But the prime minister claimed his policies were vindicated with his ruling AK Party scoring a decisive victory in March’s local elections. That victory and forthcoming elections could undermine any calls for a renewal of anti-government protests, according to Sinan Ulgen, visiting scholar for the Carnegie Institute in Brussels.

"There is now an electoral cycle in process, one of the impact is that allows people to vent their frustrations at the ballot box and therefore the existence of this electoral cycle, provides a guarantee that they people can vent their frustrations, and therefore they might not feel the need to take it out on the street," he said.

For protestor Ergen, the Gezi anniversary brings mixed emotions.

He says, "I feel disillusioned; I think the government has not changed. But there is a sense that it can happen again so that’s exciting, we will wait and see."

The government appears not to be taking any chances, with a major security operation in force in Istanbul and in several other major cities aimed at preventing any unrest. Observers say the scale of the operation is an indication that one year on, the prime minister still sees the Gezi movement as a threat to his rule. [Read More]

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Source: VOA News: War and Conflict