To the foreign journalists who have been coming to Istanbul for the past three weeks and asking me how the Gezi Park and Taksim Square issues are to be solved, I have always said the same things:

• What we are going through reminds me more of the 1989 Velvet Revolution I witnessed in Prague than being "Turkey’s Tahrir."
• Taksim Square is the heart of Istanbul, which is Turkey’s jewel. This situation is not sustainable and will end soon.
• Although what I have been seeing reminds me of the Velvet Revolution, I am worried that Taksim-Gezi Park could end up like 1989 Beijing, and Taksim could be our Tiananmen Square.

Since last weekend, we are no longer in a position to discuss Taksim resembling the Velvet Revolution or being Istanbul’s Tahrir. We are looking at, instead, "A la Turca Tiananmen.” I have to admit, sadly, that my concerns — my fears — have materialized.

On June 13, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a five-hour meeting in Ankara with 11 people representing the Gezi Park resistance. The next day, he held two other meetings separately with civil-society movement Taksim Solidarity Platform, commonly accepted as the initiator of the Gezi Park actions, and a group of well-known actors and actresses who had given significant support to the Gezi Park protests. The meetings lasted until the early Saturday-morning hours.

Hopes that the resistance would end peacefully were boosted by the announcement of an accord on three major points. Moreover, the governor of Istanbul had practically become a dove, generously using his Twitter account to share soft reconciliatory messages with the youth and even meeting them on the seashore of Dolmabahce, below Taksim, to chat through the night. Turkey had never seen a public official so understanding and affectionate toward activists.