Protesters today rejected Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's "last warning" to evacuate an Istanbul park at the centre of mass anti-government demos, setting the stage for a showdown in a deadly conflict that has rocked the country.
Representatives for the thousands camping out in Gezi Park said they rejected Erdogan's offer to leave the park in return for a referendum on its planned redevelopment, after the fight to save the site snowballed into the biggest challenge to the Islamic-rooted government's decade-long rule.
"We will stay in Gezi Park with all our demands and sleeping bags," Taksim Solidarity, the core group behind the campaign, said in a statement.
Demonstrators have been camping out in the park since May 31, when police brutally responded to a campaign to save the site's 600 trees from being chopped. The crackdown sparked an outpouring of anger across the country at Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), seen as increasingly authoritarian.
Four people have died and some 5,000 of the demonstrators, most of whom are young and middle-class, have been injured in two weeks of unrest across Turkey.
"We did not suffer through the attacks... So that a referendum could take place," the statement added.
After labelling the protesters "vandals" and "extremists", Erdogan yesterday made his first concession by suggesting a popular vote on plans to build a replica of Ottoman-era military barracks in Gezi Park, which borders Istanbul's Taksim Square, if demonstrators pulled out of the green patch.
But today he resumed his combative stance against the protesters.
"I'm making my last warning: mothers, fathers please withdraw your kids from there," the premier said in a live television broadcast. "Gezi Park does not belong to occupying forces. It belongs to everybody.
