PM Erdoğan Arrives in Istanbul
PM Erdoğan arrived in Istanbul last night after a 4 day long trip from North Africa region.
Several cabinet members and parliamentary deputies including Interior Minister Muammer Güler, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Taner Yıldız welcomed PM Erdoğan at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport in the early hours of this morning.
Scores of Justice and Development Party members also came to the airport to support PM Erdoğan with anti-Gezi slogans such as “Istanbul is here, where are the looters?”, “Hurray for Selim the Grim” and “Yield the way, let’s crush Taksim”.
Addressing the crowd at the airport, PM Erdoğan mentioned on a variety of topics including Garanti Bank General Manager who said “I am also a looter”, police violence, journalists, and artists who openly showed their support to Gezi Park resistance.
Some of the highlights from Erdoğan’s speech included:
* My brothers in Morocco and Algeria told me that “this will be over too”. Because they said they believed in me.
* We are here despite the ratio interest lobby. This lobby believes that they can threaten us with stocks market speculations. They should know one thing for sure. We will not let them exploit our nation’s labors.
* If a general manager of a bank can loudly support the vandal groups, they are going to be confronted by us too. We came to these days by expanding Turkey’s economy. Those who used to say that Turkey got 5 times richer [during AKP’s term] are now attacking us.
* Who would believe 10 year ago if I said the southeastern province of Hakkari will have an airport? When we came to power, only 26 cities had airports, now the number is 50.
* Gezi Park doesn’t even house 15 trees, but left 3 people dead. Two young people and a police officers became martyr. The death of these young people are as important as the death of the police officer.
* They are telling the police to withdraw. This is not nobody’s land. This is the republic of Turkey. There might be excessive force but police did its job against violators. Nobody has the right to attack us.
* They have made themselves insensitive as far as burning a Turkish flag. They have acted irresponsibly and provoked injustice among crowds by presenting themselves as journalist, artist or politician. (ÇT/BM)