It took Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan 16 days to do what he should have done within 48 hours of the eruption of the Gezi Park resistance that has cast shadows on Turkey’s growing profile in the international arena and has become the worst crisis of his ten-year rule.
He could have done what he did on June 12 earlier, upon his return from a four-day North African trip on the 10th day of the resistance. Instead of gathering thousands of people at the Istanbul airport in the early hours of June 7 to deliver a “war speech,” if he had met the 11 representatives of the resistance, the situation could have been much different.