June 4, 2014 | Quoted by Armin Rosen, Business Insider

Watch Turkey’s Prime Minister Apparently Going Ballistic On Protestors

It hasn't been an easy week for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and now he's been accused of engaging in baldly thuggish behavior.

In a video published by left-wing Turkish media, a man who appears to be Erdogan lashes out at protestors in Soma, site of a mine disaster that's killed upwards of 270 people, calling for his resignation. At 1:54, a man begins muttering something, before Erdogan lunges at a member of the crowd.

The audio is muffled. And although this video appears to show the man in charge of the world's 18th-largest economy getting hostile with a group of protestors, both the target and intent of the statements at the end of the video are far from obvious. Some experts believe the voice to be Erdogan's, but there's little way of knowing for sure that the voice belongs to him.

Merve Tahiroglu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies stresses that it's not clear whether Erdogan spoke the words on the tape, or even what's being said. But she walked Business Insider through some of the less translatable portions of the tape.

“Dolu could mean offspring, sperm, or seed. I would not translate it as 'son' because 'dol' is a far more vulgar word,” she said.

“Ulan” is similarly edgy language.

“It’s a colloquial and culture-specific term,” with no English equivalent, Tahiroglu said. “The best way to explain it would be to say it’s a term men use to address each other when they are in an argument or fight.”

The fact that it precedes “Israeli offspring” indicates that that term is being used in a specifically derogatory context, she said.

Merve Tahiroglu is a research associate at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where she focuses on Turkey.

Issues:

Turkey