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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Istanbul IMF-WB summit protests: silenced?


I have been looking in several news sites and could find nothing. Only Basque left-wing newspaper Gara makes a meaningful mention of the protests and violent repression that have shaken
Istanbul as the yearly IMF and World Bank summit took place. Please, if you know anything more, let me know.

Per Gara, the city of the Bosporus has been virtually taken over by a huge police deployment, very specially at the centric area of Sisli, where the globalist financial meeting took place.

On Tuesday ago the main fights happened at the district of Beyoglu, beginning at Taksim Plaza and and continued for hours until the gases made the situation unbearable. The demonstration called there was mercilessly smashed by the police, what nevertheless did not avoid inccidents but in fact seems to be the main cause of them. A trader, Issac Kalvo, died of a heart attack in them.

Yesterday it was the centric district of Sisli the scene of the main struggles. In spite of the overwhelming police presence, demonstrators managed to block Pangalti Avenue for some time. There, a student identified as Mehmet, declared that the IMF and World Bank have sunk our country into misery, those who make deals to sell weapons that are used to kill Kurds, Alevis, Communists and that dissidence is smashed, want to come here to sell recipes to get out of the crisis.

Some masked street guerrilla groups managed to succesfully attack cash machines, bank offices and shops of multinational corporations. A different group managed to reach to the E5 highway and block it for some time.

Yesterday there were 34 people arrested, three of which in the mostly Alevi (a progressive Shia sect) and leftist neighbourhood of Gaziosmanpasa, who are being accused of membership in the illegal Revolutionary People's Liberation Party (DHKP-C) and of carrying more than twenty molotov cocktails.
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