The Street Protest

Given free time, Turks prefer spending it either outside or socializing with people who agree with them. The best days are ones you combine both and nothing quite combines the beauty of "outdoors" with the kinship of "having your mob dispersed by tear gas" as well as a public protest.

Last week the streets of Istanbul were full of cheer as many teary-eyed residents took to the streets on Tuesday and Wednesday to protest the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund; young people pointed out the flaws of globalization with graphic depictions of rocks thrown through bank windows while the police were able to offer their own rebuttals via water-cannons and arrests.

Granted, whether the cause is ending globalization or just free pizza, convincing young people to break things is not difficult, but street protests have become such an integral part of Turkish culture they can emerge for any number of reasons from "government action/inaction" to "your team losing a game" and sometimes even "having nothing better to do on a weekend."

Some of the more popular reasons to take to the streets include (but are not limited to):

Capitalism

The annual International Labor Day protests on May 1st are in much the same anti-imperialist tone as the IMF ones: young people donning their favorite store-bought Che Guevara shirts and marching in a mob until police get bored enough to lob tear gas. Most will disperse to go home and complain about "the Man" while a few stick around to break windows and vandalize trash cans and/or lampposts.

If May 1st or the next IMF meeting is too far off, small gangs of communist protesters wander downtown Istanbul on any given day, chipping away at capitalism by talking amongst themselves.

Islam threatened

Religious Muslims have a near-endless supply of topics to be offended over and almost all of them can be solved by flag-burning.

Just the day before the IMF meetings began, thousands gathered in front of the Israeli consulate to burn Israeli flags as repercussion for the shutting down of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Israel's Gaza incursion earlier in the year elicited a similar reaction.

Sometimes, usually around when one runs out of flammable Israeli flags, fundamentalists might focus on other countries, like when Turks took to the streets against Denmark and Sweden (links Turkish) over Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.

There are plenty of opportunities to express outrage when the only real limitation is making sure the offending country has enough flags for sale to maintain a decent bonfire, which is why you rarely see Muslims protesting Haiti.

Islam too threatening

The Ataturk Thought Association (named after the revered founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose name means "father of all Turks") has remained vigilant in protecting the values of Kemalism (the modern principles the republic was founded on and all Turks must abide by, again named after the founder) by staging massive protests in 2007, 2008 and 2009 against an Islamic administration and its primitive attempts to make citizens unquestioningly follow an all-encompassing ideology handed down by an infallible patriarchal entity. You know... God.

Kemalism has many principles, irony is not one of them.

Secularists: the independent free-thinkers of Turkey

The reasons behind protests are too long to list and can range from police brutality in Greece to headscarves being banned in Turkish universities; the only real limitations are whether the cause "can rhyme in public chant" and "can it fit on a cardboard sign?"

Turks might publicly fume over the underdog of the week, but even we have trouble rallying against places like Kyrgyzstan; a country too hard to pronounce, harder to spell and few have seen a Kyrgyz flag long enough to tell whether it looks flammable or not.