Before the coup, a crisis for football at Turkey’s Taksim Square

After a lazy brunch at Bebek and a blissful afternoon nap in the hotel room, I decided to go to Taksim to spend the Saturday evening. My first impression of Taksim Square on that cold December evening was simply overwhelming. That was 2011 and my first trip to Istanbul.

In the next twelve months, work took me to Istanbul couple of more times and I made sure that I went to Taksim Square as often as I could. Istanbul is a spectacular city, the crossroads of civilisations where East meets West. While the rich historical Sultanahmet area takes one to a different time and space, the sheer vibrancy of Taksim Square fascinated me. Gezi Park next door was a lovely little green space which provided solace from the urban modernisation of the Beyoglu district.

When I heard the news of the police breakdown at Gezi Park on May 28, 2013, it was a personal shock. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government (he is the President now) decided to destroy the park as part of their redevelopment plan. The plan included building a replica of 19th century Ottoman barracks with a shopping mall and a mosque with added sidewalks to make the square more pedestrian-friendly. There was a protest demonstration at the park that attracted a few hundred environmentalists who braved police attacks that included tear gas and water cannons.

For the larger section of the society, the fury was caused not just by the decision to destroy the park but also, largely, because of the impervious way the redevelopment decision was taken by the government. Hence the abusive response of the authorities touched a nerve and more people started joining the protest. Within days the hashtags #DirenGeziParki (Resist Gezi Park) and the account for Ayaga Kalk Taksim (Stand Up Taksim) started trending all over social media. Turkish actor Mehmet Ali Alabora tweeted (in Turkish), “It’s not just about Gezi Park friend, haven’t you understood? Come over.” It got thousands of retweets.

The situation in Turkey became one of a war zone.

There were diverse gatherings across all the 81 provinces in Turkey and the government acted as though it was waging an invisible war against its dissidents. Apart from anti-government media organisations, a large number of people from civil society groups, members of football fan clubs, arts communities and various marginal groups joined the protest. Prime Minister Erdogan managed to have Turkey among the three countries in the world, alongside Iran and China, with the most journalists behind bars.

There had been charges against Erdogan of trying to pit the financially stressed football clubs against their fans, who played prominent role in the Gezi Park Protest. In particular, 35 football fans had been prosecuted, accused of trying to overthrow the government during the mass protests. All the fans were associated with the “Carsi” group, the well-known supporter group of Besiktas Gymnastics Club, which includes the Besiktas Football Club.

The Carsi are a tad different from typical fan groups, and they manifest their difference during football matches through their chants, as well as through the placards they carry to the stadium. People from different social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds came together to form the group and they stand against racism, fascism, and sexism. Their pro-environment stance made them participate in the Gezi Park Protest spontaneously and with strong intent. However, prosecuting them for attempting a coup was completely baseless. Emma Sinclair-Webb, a senior Human Rights researcher in Turkey, said, “Charging these Besiktas football club fans as enemies of the state for joining a public protest is a ludicrous travesty.”

The court accepted the lawsuit on September 11, 2014. According to the summons, the Carsi members were accused of attempting to capture the Prime Minister’s offices in Ankara and Istanbul and to overthrow the government. In reality, the accused Carsi members were actively participating in the mass protests at Gezi Park and on the night of June 2, 2013 they hotwired a bulldozer from the construction site outside Besiktas’s Inonu Stadium and used it to push the police’s water cannon trucks away from their home turf.

The evidence submitted against the fans consisted of intercepted phone calls and text messages, possession of gas masks and goggles. The defendants’ intercepted calls and messages did not establish any proof of criminal activity, but just their opinion about the government, emotional sentiments of support for the demonstrations, and a few abstract claims. Cem Yakiskan, one of Carsi’s leaders, jokingly said, “If we had the power to carry out a coup, we would make Besiktas the champion.” For the record, Besiktas last won the league in 2008-09.

On the first day of the trial, some of the defendants and lawyers wore black-and-white Besiktas jerseys.

Fans marched to the Istanbul court carrying banners with the Carsi logo – with its characteristic anarchy-style A – shouting slogans. There was unprecedented support from large sections of people, including fans of city rivals Galatasaray and Fenerbahce, who are otherwise their sworn enemies.

For a lot of people, the sight of people wearing surgical masks and safety helmets, chasing the police and waving Turkish flags from the top of a bulldozer, was one of the most enduring images from civil unrest.

It’s true that among all the football fans, the Carsı group were on the frontlines in the “Gezi Park Protest”. Despite police brutality, they maintained their humour all along through their tweets and graffiti. A tweet asked everyone to call 155 (police hotline) to say that it is already noon and the police are late.

A New Yorker article in 2011 cited a headline that sarcastically called the Besiktas stands, “the only place where the Armenian problem has been solved”. It’s well known that the history between Armenia and Turkey is not very pleasant, and hence there is a stereotype that Armenians in Turkey support Besiktsas. Carsi has a strong pluralist image. One of their most prominent members, Alen Markaryan, is of Armenian descent. They say: “We are the people’s team; our leftists are populists, our nationalists are populists, our Islamists are populists – you can’t find extremists in Carsi. Our members support and protect the people and Carsi is an umbrella under which everyone is included.”

If we go back in time, Besiktas was established during the late Ottoman period in 1903.

Fuat Balkan, who had represented Turkey in the 1924 Paris Olympic in Fencing, was the president of Besiktas in the early years. He was a close associate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revolutionary army officer who founded the Republic of Turkey. Quite naturally, Atatürk’s sympathy and support gave Besiktas a philosophical foundation of secularist principles and an adherence to hard left-wing politics.

This year the (in) famous Kıtalar Arası Derbi between Galatasaray and Fenerbahce was to be played on Sunday, March 20, but the Turkish authorities called off the match just about a couple of hours before kick-off. A brief statement from the Istanbul governor’s office said that the match was postponed following “the assessment of serious intelligence”. No other details were provided.

The fans of both the clubs were found arguing with security officials outside Galatasaray’s Turk Telekom Arena Stadium. The unofficial claim is there was a serious bomb threat in the stadium and hence the authorities were forced to cancel the high voltage game. The decision came a day after an Islamic State group linked suicide bomber blew himself up, killing four tourists and injuring 36 others on Istanbul’s main pedestrian street of Taksim Square located at the heart of the city. Alarmingly this was the sixth attack since July 2015 and all of them are mostly linked to either ISIS or Kurdish militants.

Away fans are barred from attending the derby games between the Istanbul big three – Galatasaray, Besiktas and Fenerbahce. This ban was applied several times in the last decade to avoid violence and has become a norm since 2011. The ban has been extended to men’s and women’s volleyball and basketball games as well. There have been number of protests against this ban but the authority is firm that the ban on the away fans is here to stay.

The Turkish authority has introduced the PASSOLIG card in conjunction with Turkish law no. 6222 on prevention of violence and disorder in sports. The card is also an attempt to put an end to the era of printed tickets. It’s a multipurpose card which acts as ATM, credit and store discount card and, in contracted cities, as transportation card.

On the flip side, people need to enter their personal data to register for the card and personal details include their favourite club as well. Football lovers see this as a way to uphold the ban on visiting fans in Istanbul, which caused a major drop in attendance in Turkish super league games. This is a serious issue of breaching privacy, and most common Turkish people see this as an attempt by the government to control football fans.

Excerpted with permission from Tiro: A Football Odyssey from Amazon to Alps, Goaldentimes.org, Rattis Books.