By two local believers. June 4^th, 2013

Today is the fifth day of protests in dozens of cities throughout Turkey. The demonstrations began at Gezi Park in Istanbul where dozens of people had been protesting government plans to remove the park to make way for a possible shopping mall. The park is a well-loved green space with some trees that were apparently planted during the era of Ataturk in the early 20th century. The original protests were generally peaceful and environmentalist in nature, but there was already a political element given the park's renown and the current government's "moderate Islamist" stance. Secularists in Turkey are normally supporters of Ataturk and his reforms and they are often at odds with the Islamists.

The police responded to the demonstration with a show of force, moving people out of the park and using tear gas and pepper spray. Word of the excessive force used by police spread quickly and images of clashes between protestors and police flooded Twitter and Facebook. Thousands of people in Istanbul were moved to action to express solidarity with the protestors at Gezi Park, and the police escalated the situation with increasing violence, including street tanks, water cannons, and more gas cannisters.

People in other cities, also outraged at the police response to the demonstrations, began to take to the streets. The protests were quickly broadened to include expressions of discontent with Turkey's current government, particularly the perceived strong-handed control being wielded by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish police forces. Crowds in more than 20 of Turkey's 81 provinces participated in the protests. People began calling for the prime minister to resign, and graffiti related to Erdogan and the police began to appear throughout the country.

The protests have grown in intensity and clashes with police have become increasingly violent. Several political parties and causes are riding the wave of public discontent and attempting to coopt the demonstrations. And as the crowds are increasingly emboldened the destruction that they are causing also increases. It seems that the protests are losing some of the public support because of the lack of a clear message and the damage that people are seeing on the street.

These events have been a wake-up call to the ruling party and there will have to be an ongoing effort to win back the confidence of the people. Erdogan's initial statements were dismissive of the protests as he defended the actions of his government and the police. And now he is out of the country on a scheduled diplomatic trip to North Africa. The deputy prime minister made a statement, today, however, apologizing for the excessive force used to quash the initial protest at Gezi Park. This is an obvious sign that the government is now being forced to reconsider Erdogan's dismissive approach…

June 5, 2013

We wanted to let you know about the recent events in Turkey and ask you to join us in prayer. The protests are still going on 78 cities with different intensity. The hardest ones are in Istanbul, Izmir, and Ankara. The protest is against the intolerance and dictatorship of the government. The people who are protesting want the government to respect their rights, instead of keeping to change the laws to control their lives. There has never been such a protest before in Turkey. The protesters are mainly college students and elderly people. They just sit, walk, sing, and talk. There is no violence or resistance on their side when the police beat them up to arrest them. They even clean the mess and bad graffiti about the prime minister every morning until 4:00PM! It’s amazing! People just want to be free from the dictatorship of the government and live in real democracy, not on paper, and they do it with a very civilized and loving attitude. They even serve food and drink to the police who are attacking them with gas bombs, water tanks, etc.

We were hoping that people would not die, but one person was killed by the police in Ankara and another in Antakya during protests. The prime minister started to threaten indirectly by saying that he has been holding 50% of his people not to get involved and do something against the protesters. He’ll probably announce what he will do on Saturday and if he releases that 50% on the protesters, a civil war will start and many people will die. Please, pray with us (and even fast if you can) that God will resolve it before many people die. May His will be done and may we believers be ready to be used by Him as He works in His sovereign ways.

Let’s join our brothers and sisters in Turkey in praying for their nation at this crucial time in its history.

(The following article was published in the Asia (print) edition of The Economist May 11, 2013 and shared with us by the Malaysia Prayer Fellowship.)

Malaysia’s General Election, Tawdry victory, The government scrapes home—allegedly aided by vote rigging

ON MAY 5th Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional coalition, led by the prime minister, Najib Razak, was re-elected for the 13th time in a row. Barisan won a majority of seats in parliament, 133 out of 222, against 89 for the opposition, a three-party coalition called Pakatan Rakyat and led by Anwar Ibrahim. The turnout was a record 85%. And so the same government which has ruled Malaysia since independence from Britain in 1957 is set for another five years in office.

Within Barisan, the overriding sense is of relief. It did slightly better in terms of seats than some had predicted. Scratch the surface, however, and in almost every respect this was a lamentable result for the ruling coalition, its worst ever. Not only did it lose a further seven seats to Pakatan, but it won with only 47% of the popular vote. It is further evidence of how the electoral system is skewed in Barisan’s favour, allowing it to stack up seats in the rural Malay heartlands with far fewer voters than Pakatan needs to win seats in more urban areas. In many places the opposition increased large majorities. For instance, in Penang in the north of the country the Barisan defeat was so humiliating that its candidate for governor, Teng Chang Yeow, resigned from all his party posts. Several government ministers lost their seats.

Most striking was that ethnic Chinese (about a quarter of the population) shifted their votes away from Barisan towards the opposition. The Chinese party of the Barisan coalition, the Malaysian Chinese Association, won just seven seats, down from 15, whereas the opposition’s mainly Chinese Democratic Action Party (DAP) picked up ten seats, for a final tally of 38.

Mr. Najib, unwisely, spoke of a “Chinese tsunami” breaking over his Barisan coalition. He has only his party to blame. The United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) dominates the Barisan coalition and appeals mainly to ethnic Malays and other indigenous groups who make up two-thirds of the population. UMNO ran a nasty, divisive campaign in the heartlands. This shored up its base of rural Malay voters, known as the bumiputra (“sons of the soil”). But it also alienated Chinese and other voters, already tired of the cronyism and corruption associated with affirmative-action policies that favour Malays over other ethnicities in business, education and the civil service.

So, despite professing to promote a multi-ethnic Malaysia, Barisan’s election strategy has left the country more divided than ever, both along ethnic lines and between urban and rural areas. The Malay press has not helped, with headlines asking “What more do the Chinese want, as it ethnic Chinese acted ungratefully towards Barisan…

Yet the result will not be the only dent in the government’s authority. So too will be the manner in which it was gained. Barisan starts all elections with incumbent advantages, including a slavish state media, tons of cash and constituency boundaries drawn in its favour. On top of that, allegations of dirty campaign tricks abound. “Phantom voters”, for example, appear to have been bussed into marginal constituencies to boost the Barisan vote. Nurul Izzah Anwar, Mr. Anwar’s daughter, contested one such seat in Kuala Lumpur. She and her supporters met several Bangladeshi workers who had been brought into the constituency to vote. She won, but only just…

Mr Anwar claims that fraud cost him the election. On May 8^th. he and followers staged a big protest rally against the result. His claim is almost certainly an exaggeration. Still, the bitterness engendered by the vote will persist. “National reconciliation”, which Mr. Najib sees as the way to heal the wounds, looks a way off.

Pray for the healing of Malaysia’s political, social and religious divisions and for the raising up of strong indigenous church movements in all the diverse people groups of this multi-cultural nation.