From the Gezi Park Protests to the Akbelen Forest: Care in the Context of Democracy and Political Dissent

ABSTRACT

In this essay, a brief history of environmental protests in Turkey will be followed by a discussion connected to two central frameworks: the logic of extractivism and care. Specifically, we argue that analysis of events such as the recent protests in the Akbelen Forest, just as the Gezi Park protests over a decade ago, need to account for the fact that a great deal of environmentalism and environmental activism is linked to broader social and political critique, particularly in countries such as Turkey with what is described as a “neo-authoritarian” or “new authoritarian” administration. We argue that these events and the ways in which they have materialized point to the need to pay further attention to intersections such as narrated space and spaces of narrativity, in this particular case, vis-à-vis care, democracy and political dissent.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental advocacy
• extractivism
• care
• democracy
• media
• activism

Introduction

Just over a decade has passed since protests centered in Istanbul against the Erdogan administration garnered massive international media attention, with the Gezi Park movement becoming a seminal moment symbolizing opposition to an increasingly authoritarian Turkish government. Lost in the coverage and aftermath was the fact that Gezi Park was initially a local environmental demonstration – petitions began to be circulated a half year earlier, at the end of 2012 – involving little more than 50 activists protesting against the cutting down of trees to allow for the construction of a shopping mall in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Aggressive police efforts to move the demonstrators backfired, and within a matter of weeks, the numbers had swelled into the thousands. By that time, the niche environmental protest had morphed into a large-scale demonstration against the state of Turkish democracy.

Almost exactly a year after the start of the Gezi Park protests, another demonstration against the felling of trees broke out in Turkey, this time in a non-urban part of the country, covering a far larger area and involving the cutting down of large swathes of forest. Despite the geographic and proportional differences between the two protests, the proposed destruction of the Akbelen forest in southwestern Turkey, primarily to allow for the expansion of mining to feed the enormous power coal-fired plant at nearby Yatagan, came to symbolize the same core issues: the hegemony of neoliberal privatization and de-/re-regulation, a dominant logic of extractivism, the disregard of environmental concerns, corporate control of land and of (previously) public space, lack of transparency and political authoritarianism.

In this essay, a brief history of environmental protests in Turkey will be followed by a discussion connected to two central frameworks: the logic of extractivism and care. Specifically, we argue that analysis of events such as the recent protests in the Akbelen Forest, just as the Gezi Park protests over decade ago, need to account for the fact that a great deal of environmentalism and environmental activism is linked to broader social and political critique, particularly in countries such as Turkey with what is described as a “neo-authoritarian” (Becker, 2004) or “new authoritarian” (Sömer, 2016) administration (Christensen, 2019). As Özkaynak et al. (2015) wrote:

because the events surrounding Gezi Park clearly revealed the intricate relationship between the state, capital, and the environment, people are now more aware of the fact that environmental problems are actually interlinked and largely structural and political rather than technical in nature. (p. 111)

In other words, care for the environment must to be understood not simply as a stand-alone issue, but also as care for broader democracy.

A decade of environmental protest in Turkey

Doğu (2019) notes that “in Turkey, there has been a notable increase in the number of environmental concerns over the last decade and as a consequence, many local protests have been organized all around the country” (618). Between the Gezi and Akbelen demonstrations, Turkey witnessed a series of significant environmental protests and actions, with many linked to the specific issue of mining and wide-scale extraction. While well-known in Turkey, these protests have received relatively little attention both outside of the country and in academic research (particularly within environmental communication). A brief outline of three events and activist actions over the past decade gives a sense of how environmental concerns have become a nexus in the fight against corporate power, privatization and exploitation of public space, the environment and political nepotism.

Cerattepe Forest and Artvin

For almost three decades, environmental activists have been fighting proposed mining operations in and around the Cerattepe Forest in the Artvin Province of northeastern Turkey. In 1985, and in order to meet the demands of an expanding economy, Turkey deregulated its extraction industries, thereby allowing foreign companies to obtain mining licenses. When such a license was granted to Canadian companies to mine for gold in the Artvin region, one of the first major environmental protests in Turkey took root. While the activism ultimately led to the Canadian companies being expelled from the region, the Turkish mining company Cengiz Holding – with the support of the current AKP government – has mined for copper in the region since 2017, aided by the passage of an emergency law following a purported coup attempt in 2016 that allowed the governor of Artvin to ban all protests for two years (Üner, 2023, pp. 173–174). In relation to the continued fight against copper mining in the region in recent years, Doğu (2019) wrote that “the resistance in Cerattepe turned out to be one of the largest among those protests, becoming a significant element of the contemporary environmental movement in Turkey.”

Uludağ National Park

Uludag National Park was created in 1961, making it (at the time), just the fifth national park in Turkey. The Uludağ mountain area is of particular environmental importance as it is home to an extremely wide variety of flora and fauna, including a significant number of plant species that are endemic only to Uludağ. Commercial pressures to open the area for development have been present since the 1980s, as the location became popular for skiing and tourism. The national park status of the area, however, has hindered significant development, with multiple attempts to build in the area stopped via court injunctions, led by the Bursa Bar Association. At the end of 2022, however, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) put forward a motion entitled the “Uludağ District Authority Legislative Proposal” which would transfer authority over the Uludağ National Park from the National Parks authority to the Culture and Tourism Ministry and the local district ministry. The proposal was almost immediately accepted by the Public Works, Development, Transportation, and Tourism Commission. Shifting control away from the National Parks authority would allow the area to become open for development: something that the Bursa Water Collective, an environmental activist group, has been fighting for several years to stop out of fears that the delicate ecosystem in the area would be destroyed by development and tourism.

Hasankeyf Dam

When citizens and activists gathered in the early summer of 2023 to protest the cutting down of trees in the Akbelen forest, one of the groups to offer words of solidarity was Hasankeyf Coordination, which had fought against the 2019–2020 flooding of 100 miles of the upper Tigris river, including the bronze-age town of Hasankeyf as part of the Ilısu Dam project. The statement from Hasankeyf Coordination read:

We know from Hasankeyf and Tigris Valley those who massacred the forest for mining in Akbelen and those who protected them. As a result of state policies, all parts of the country are in danger of destruction. Everyday, a different living space is destroyed for the benefit of capital. It is clear that there are separate projects for each region. This predatory approach, which manifests itself with HEPPs and dams in Kurdish provinces and the Black Sea, takes the form of the destruction of natural habitats for energy and mining fields in the Aegean region. Those who defend life and living spaces against these projects face obstacles, oppression and violence by the state.

International activists had an early impact on the dam project, with international investors pulling out. The Erdogan government, however, forced Turkish banks to finance the project, with companies close to his administration obtaining the building contracts for the roads and buildings needed for the approximately 70,000 people who would be displaced when the valley was fully flooded in 2020. And, just as in Cerattepe/Artvin, local authorities used the ban on protests after the attempted coup of 2016 to stifle future activist efforts.

Akbelen Forest

A 2020 court decision to expand a coal mine in the Akbelen forest in southwestern Turkey by clearing 780 acres of woodland – significant portions used to grow olives – triggered what is widely considered to be the largest social protest in Turkey since Gezi Park in 2013. Permission for the mine expansion was given in 2020. Local residents immediately filed an injunction, and in 2021 vigils began. However, courts lifted a stay of execution in 2022 and it was when the cutting down of trees became imminent in the late spring of 2023 that the protests gained strength. In an interview, local protester Umut Kocagöz noted the pattern of environmental destruction in Turkey linked to economic dictates:

Doing a mining project in agricultural land is the story of Turkish transformation of the past 40 years, from an agricultural society to a much more industrial society, and in this process who wins is the big companies. (Jovanovski, 2023)

As with earlier environmental protests in Turkey, police and authorities used violence and threats to intimidate activists and journalists. President Erdogan said that the government was, “not interested in environmentalist-looking marginals” (Durvar English, 2023). And, just as with a number of earlier protests in Turkey, the initial focus of those taking part shifted from the local to the national and global. Video journalist Kazim Kizil, who had spent time recording and documenting the protests (and was threatened by police to stop recording), noted that local villagers who had started their protest with the intention of saving their own land and their own houses, over time began to realize the larger environmental and social implications of their fight: “At first, the villagers were more concerned about their own fields and their houses, now they are talking about concepts such as climate change, climate crisis, food crisis.”¹ By August of 2023, roughly 60% of the Akbelen forest had been destroyed.

Discussion

The extractivism of natural resources has been a central component of Turkish economic expansion since the rise of neoliberal capitalism under Prime Minister Turgut Özal in the 1980s:

Turkey is a significant example for rampant capitalism: a triumvirate of neo-liberal economics and political authoritarianism mixed with Islamist conservatism. The ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) has constructed the image of the “need to grow” and to “develop” and portrays extractivism as the way to continuing economic growth and the solution for economic predicaments. Thus, we witness former Prime-Minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s coming to power and holding on to power as the nexus between authoritarian populism, extractivism and neoliberalism. (Gündüz, 2023, p. 6)

This dominant extractivist logic (e.g. Adiguzel, 2023; Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022; Szeman and Wenzel 2021) seeing the land as little more than a limitless vending machine for economic growth – combined with Erdogan’s “new authoritarian” regime marked by disregard for civil rights, has led to a series of environmental protests in Turkey where local environmental issues have dovetailed with broader socio-political concerns. Over a decade ago, Şekercioğlu et al. (2011, p. 2765) wrote that the Erdogan regime operates “practically unopposed,” and “easily modifies existing laws and passes new ones to remove any environmental obstacles to the construction of dams, mines, factories, roads, bridges, housing projects, and tourism developments.”

Protests against environmental damage and exploitation in Turkey, while of course critical in their own right, have also become proxies for the broader struggle against social and economic injustice in Turkey. This brings us back to the key concept of “care” that links the essays in this collection. Pezzullo (2017) has written that environmental communication could be considered a “care discipline” as it, “underscores and values research devoted to unearthing human and nonhuman interconnections, interdependence, biodiversity, and system limits.” And, previously, she links this call more specifically in relation to neoliberal ideologies:

if neoliberalism is the zeitgeist of contemporary politics – championing hierarchies of capitalist individualism, hypermasculine competition, xenophobic border policing, white settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, fascist propaganda, petrochemical extractivism, and more – then care is the structure of feeling emerging in resistance. (Pezzullo, 2020)

Environmental communication practices in countries such as Turkey often fall outside of the spotlight of US and European research, particularly US and European research that considers the existence of communication within what we might broadly define as non-repressive regimes. Yet, as the case studies in this essay show, environmental activism in Turkey exists at the intersection(s) of concern for the environment and political corruption and repression. As such, it is communication that cares for both the environment and democratic rights.

The cases addressed also relate to other intersections. In our work on environmental themes in popular communication, Christensen et al. (2018, p. 1) argue that “a space-specific approach can help reveal the significance of space in considering environmental imaginaries,” and argue for the need to recognize both narrated space (the actual sites of environmental transformation) – which Christensen (2023, p. 367) also refers to as “mediated environments” such as the polar regions, oceans, forests, etc. – and spaces of narrativity (the physical and virtual sites such as news, literature, film, museum exhibitions, etc., where narrative interventions take place),. The cases of Gezi and Akbelen, to take two of the examples discussed above, can be seen as simultaneously narrated spaces and spaces of narrativity: actual sites of environmental destruction and degradation and spaces where public expression, performativity, live-streaming, dancing, activism and politics take place. The intersection creates a synergistic communicative whole greater than the sum of its parts, fueled by grassroots communicative acts.

The field, then, should welcome more research that analyzes such intersections, particularly in contexts where democracy is not the state’s ideal governance structure. In this way, we might reconsider undemocratic trends emerging in democracies across the world today, as well as how environmental advocacy might be nuanced or extended by disarticulating its key terms from democratic norms of the public sphere.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://themedialine.org/by-region/protesters-vow-to-continue-fight-to-stop-mine-expansion-in-turkish-forest/