On Tuesday (18 June), the German chancellor and the US president will embrace each other. Eyes will be shining as both sides praise the German-American friendship. After all, this visit from Washington is an election campaign present for Angela Merkel, and the president can hope for symbolic pictures to build his own legend.

The Erdoğan government’s use of force in a clampdown on protesters over the weekend has precipitated a deepening human rights and political crisis in Turkey. Human Rights Watch documented a huge wave of arbitrary detentions and police attacks on people who were on hospital premises, as well as on a hospital itself and on makeshift health clinics. With the trade union confederations declaring a strike on June 17, 2013, there were signs of further clampdown on demonstrations in the evening.

Even in the basement of the courthouse, safe behind a closed door, I’m sure the defendant could still hear the women screaming at him. I certainly could hear the women, standing just metres away, and I definitely felt their violent rage as one hit me in the arm, shouting at me - “What are you drawing in your notebook, girl, what are you drawing?” - as I walked out of the courthouse.

It has been a long and eventful week in Istanbul. It will be hard for many who were there to forget the scenes reminiscent of war on the streets around Taksim Square and Gezi Park, the site of the protests, on Tuesday evening and into the night. After apparently conciliatory tweets from Istanbul governor Hüseyin Avni Mutlu to the young protesters occupying Gezi Park just a day earlier, and following indications that the prime minister was ready to sit down to talks over the protests on Wednesday, both leaders made an astonishing about-face.