For two days, events on Istanbul's urban battlefield, Taksim Square, have followed a familiar routine.
Riot police move into the large, open space, are attacked with stones by a few protesters and then retaliate with tear gas and water canons in an on-and-off dance for control over the city’s most important urban area.
In the most serious use of force since protesters occupied Gezi Park in late May, a barrage of tear gas canisters turned the square into a sea of poisonous smoke on Tuesday night, making it impossible for protesters to attempt to take back the square. Instead, demonstrators took refuge in the adjacent Gezi Park, the central base for the thousands-strong movement and original protest site against the uprooting of trees there.
Heavy rain on Tuesday night and the following morning turned parts of the park into a muddy mess. Tear gas canisters fired into the park from Taksim burned several tents.
But by Wednesday morning some protesters returned to claim Taksim. Riot police sat in various corners of the area and in side alleys, but were largely passive. Their strategy of repeatedly driving protesters from the square before moving to its periphery and not completely clearing demonstrators out appears to gain little for the government, other than to further anger the masses fighting the effects of tear gas.
Istanbul’s governor, Huseyin Avni Mutlu, appealed to parents of the demonstrators to keep their children away from the area in an address carried on all major Turkish television networks on Tuesday evening.
“We will continue our measures in an unremitting manner, whether day or night, until marginal elements are cleared and the square is open to the people,” he said.
In the areas of the square where police have regained control, a massive clean-up operation continued on Wednesday in an attempt to return the district to a sense of normality.
Outside the Dolmabache palace, a 15-minute walk from Taksim Square and where prime minister Tayyip Erdogan has offices, hundreds of male and female riot police gather around a long line of police buses. The growing police presence on the streets of Istanbul adds to a sense of unease, with a binding solution to the standoff in Taksim Square apparently nowhere in sight.
