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Turkey unrest goes on despite end to park protest
Riot police cordoned off streets, set up roadblocks and fired tear gas and water cannon to prevent anti-government protesters from converging on Istanbul's central Taksim Square on Sunday, unbowed even as Turkey's Prime Minister addressed hundreds of thousands of supporters a few kilometers away.
Riot police cordoned off streets, set up roadblocks and fired tear gas and water cannon to prevent anti-government protesters from converging on Istanbul's central Taksim Square on Sunday, unbowed even as Turkey's Prime Minister addressed hundreds of thousands of supporters a few kilometers away.
The contrasting scenes pointed to an increasing polarization in Turkish society — one which critics say Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has fueled with the fiery rhetoric he has maintained since they began more than two weeks ago.
A police crackdown on Saturday evening that ended an 18-day peaceful sit-in at Taksim Square's Gezi Park sparked daylong unrest on the streets of Istanbul, while police also broke up demonstrations in the capital, Ankara, and the southern city of Adana. Read: Police tear gas thousands of protesters in Ankara
The protests began in Gezi Park more than two weeks ago and spread to dozens of cities across the country. Erdogan has blamed them on a nebulous plot to destabilize his government. Five people, including a policeman, have died and more than 5,000 have been injured, according to a Turkish rights group.
