ISTANBUL — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey dismissed the tens of thousands of protesters who battled for two days with police officers in the streets of Istanbul as “looters” and “bums” on Sunday. He vowed to push ahead with plans to demolish a public park — a trigger for the spasm of public anger that left Istanbul’s main commercial district strewn with graffiti and broken glass.

“We will not yield to a few looters coming to that square and provoking our people, our nation, based on their misinformation,” Mr. Erdogan said in a speech carried live on television. He brushed aside the protesters’ accusations that he was becoming dictatorial, saying he was simply “a servant of the people.”

For much of Sunday, the mood at the protests in Taksim Square was one of celebration. Tens of thousands of demonstrators returned to the square claiming victory after the police withdrew on Saturday. The protesters erected improvised barricades of construction materials and burnt public buses on streets leading to the square, replacing the ones that city workers had cleared away the day before.

Image Credit... The New York Times

But later Sunday night, the police fired tear gas on protesters in Besiktas, a nearby neighborhood. Protesters also confronted the police and were met with tear gas in the capital, Ankara, and in Izmir on the Aegean coast, underscoring that the civil unrest directed at Mr. Erdogan has yet to run its course.