Former Turkish Minister Of Culture’s Brave Tweet
While the Gezi Park protests will likely come to an end soon, Ertugrul Gunay, former minister of culture, shared some brave tweets today targeting the prime minister directly.
“Goddamn that person who attacked a woman because of her headscarf!” Ertugrul Gunay — former minister of culture in the Justice and Development Party (AKP) between August 2007 and January 2013 — tweeted today [June 14], referring to an incident that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan related by condemning all the protesters for being against religious sanctity, as if they were responsible as a group of such wrongdoing.
Allegedly, the daughter-in-law of an AKP mayor was terribly assaulted on June 1 by a group of Gezi Park protesters at Kabatas port in Istanbul, while she was also carrying her 6-month-old baby. No injuries to the baby were reported. “They will pay the price of [attacking our girls with headscarves!],” Erdogan vowed on Tuesday [June 11], while talking about this incident — which Gunay strongly condemns in his tweet.
But the former culture minister also concluded his tweet with the following: “Leave those to God, who made so many mothers cry just because of constructing an Ottoman building in a park.” And that statement is — without openly uttering the name — directed to Erdogan, and no one else.
This is certainly not the first time that Gunay took a position against Erdogan regarding the construction of the replica of the Ottoman Artillery Barracks at Taksim Square in Istanbul. There has been much speculation in Ankara’s beltway that he actually lost his job as minister of culture because of his opposition to this Taksim development project.
