Your trusted source

Press TV has interviewed Mark Glenn, Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement in Idaho, about the issue of clashes between anti-government protesters and police on the streets of Istanbul.

- How much are we going to see a return to the very first days of violence in Gezi Park?

- Well that just depends on how much support these protesters are getting. My personal theory, if you want to call it that, is that this is payback against Erdogan for the fact that he has had second thoughts about continuing on with using Turkey as a base of operations for operations against Syria.

I think that the most recent meeting that he had with Barack Obama a mere few weeks before these protests started. Probably he told President Obama that now Russia has decided to step in to this thing in a very manly fashion that Turkey is no longer interested in getting involved in World War III.

And that the payback for this is that the United States is using these various groups that it has used throughout the rest of the world to bring about these color revolutions and they are using these groups now to cause this kind of unrest in Turkey with the means of punishing Erdogan.

So, I think it's really the case of how much the United States and these other Western governments want to push Erdogan and push the issue and whether or not they think that Erdogan is going to buckle under the pressure.

- Advancing to the protests in Turkey, we know that the development project and Gezi Park has been canceled now. Just looking back at how the issue was dealt with, was there any need for violence and why couldn't the issue have been solved peacefully?

- Well, remember that the Arab world, the Middle East has been racked now with protests for the last two and a half, almost three years. And certainly Erdogan is capable of reading the writing on the wall.

He can see where these protests are going to go if they're not dealt with in a heavy hand. All we have to do is look back to what took place in Tunisia, what took place in Egypt and what has been going on throughout the entire Middle East.

By the way, I am certainly not in any way defending Erdogan's actions. I am merely trying to explain what I imagine is going on in his head.

He is a career politician; he wants to stay there for as long a he can. And if Turkey goes up in flames because of these protests and he is forced to move away the way that many other leaders have been forced to, then that would be the final chapter on his political career.

So he has had to, in his own mind, he has to deal heavily with these protesters for the means of putting out a fire that threatens him politically.