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.

Delayed and half-baked measures do not become solutions. That is the takeaway of the five-hour meeting in Ankara that can best be categorized as too little, too late. Huseyin Celik, a Justice and Development Party (AKP) notable, former minister and current party spokesperson who attended the meeting with Prime Minister Erdogan and ministers of interior, culture and urbanization, declared that a referendum might be called in Istanbul to determine the fate of Gezi Park. He added also that it was time to evacuate the park. By that time, reports were already circulating that Erdogan had instructed the minister of interior to “finish this matter within 24 hours.”

It is not realistic to expect the Gezi Park protesters and their representatives to be satisfied with the “possibility of a referendum.” The Taksim Platform, consisting of some 80 leading non-governmental organizations orchestrating the resistance, announced it would not agree to a referendum and that it had no intention of evacuating the park.