TURKISH DELIGHT. Turkey seethes after Soma

This May 1, I walked a few metres from my house in central Istanbul to get milk and got a faceful of teargas instead. I looked up, eyes watering, and saw the normally peaceful street filled with police, crowds and shattered glass. Right before me, an angry mob was demolishing a bus stop. Istanbul is no stranger to furious protests, but in the past these have been usually confined to Taksim Square, the usual venue for unrest. This time, there were scuffles throughout Istanbul. Turkey’s people are angry.

And they have much to be angry about. Much of the country appears to be reaching a tipping point over Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s dictatorial ways. Only 10 days after May Day protests filled the streets again. The Soma disaster, on May 13th, has enraged the country and driven even fervent supporters of Erdogan to criticise him. Some 301 miners slowly choked to death from carbon monoxide poisoning in a coal mine in Soma, about 500 km from Istanbul. Erdogan’s misguided response was to compare Soma to accidents in Britain of the 1860s, saying, “These types of things in mines happen all the time.”

That comment was like a red rag to a bull. Visiting Soma, Erdogan was forced to take refuge in a supermarket when he was besieged by angry relatives. Erdogan’s advisor Yusuf Yerkel was filmed kicking a protestor. One protester also complained that Erdogan had slapped him.

The streets of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Soma have been swept by protests. The police have responded brutally, with teargas and water cannons. Meanwhile, it emerged that unsafe conditions in the Soma mine had been discussed before, but ignored. Bloomberg reported that Turkey’s parliament had discussed safety conditions at the Soma mine last month, according to a provincial lawmaker Ozgur Ozel. Ozel said a mine safety commission was backed by opposition parties, but rejected by the ruling AKP.

In a 2012 interview, Soma mines CEO Alp Gürkan boasted that he had reduced the production costs of a tonne of coal from $140 to $23.80, while more than doubling turnover. Soma workers say their mines have been unsafe for years. Opposition lawmakers have accused the ruling party of having ties with mine-owners. The owners and managers of the mine have been arrested but many Turkish people are wondering if the price they have paid for the breakneck economic development of the Erdogan years is too high.

In Istanbul, weeping protesters carried banners saying “Erdogan is a murderer”. To be sure, it’s not all Erdogan’s fault. Turkey has long ignored international regulations on mining safety. But Erdogan seems to be the public embodiment of a callous, arrogant, growth-obsessed state. Columnist Mustafa Akyol, who has often been pro-AKP in the past, summed up popular feeling in an op-ed in the Hurriyet daily newspaper, “Why does Erdogan never accept any responsibility in any wrongdoing and never, ever, apologise for something he or his team has done?”

Erdogan, true to form, has accused critics of trying to politicise the mine tragedy, going so far as to claim a BBC correspondent hired actors to pose as the wives of miners. This kind of blatant chutzpah has worked for Erdogan before. During the Gezi Park protests last summer, and following corruption allegations last December, he blamed the shadowy Fethullah Gul movement for conspiring against the government. It worked; the AKP swept the local elections.

But in the face of horrific tales of desperate miners taking turns to grab a mouthful of air from a tube, and TV footage of crying Soma children, whom will he blame now?

The writer is a journalist based in Bangalore and Istanbul