Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade.
Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan.
Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but Agence France-Presse (AFP) was unable to independently confirm the figure.
Photo: CHP Press Service via AFP
The mass protests, which began with Imamoglu’s March 19 detention on contested fraud and “terror” charges, have prompted a repressive government response that has been sharply condemned by rights groups and drawn criticism from abroad.
Widely seen as the only politician capable of challenging Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the ballot box, Imamoglu was elected as CHP’s candidate for the 2028 race on the day he was jailed.
As his wife, Dilek, arrived on stage, massive applause arose from the crowd which was a sea of Turkish flags and pictures of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founding father.
Imamoglu was resoundingly re-elected mayor for the third time last year. The anger over his arrest which began in Istanbul quickly spread across Turkey.
Nightly protests outside Istanbul City Hall drew vast crowds and often degenerated into running battles with riot police, who used teargas, pepper spray and rubber bullets to disperse the protesters.
“We are here today for our homeland. We, the people, elect our rulers,” said 17-year-old Melis Basak Ergun, a young protester who vowed they would never be cowed “by violence or tear gas.”
“We stand behind our mayor, Imamoglu,” Ergun said.
Turkish authorities did not comment on the latest mass protest. Erdogan has previously branded the demonstrations “street terror.”
In a letter read out to the crowd, Imamoglu addressed Turkey’s youngsters, saying that “if young people are on the front line, it’s because they’re the ones who feel most anxiety about the future.”
“The youth are telling Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Show the people respect. Don’t touch the nation’s will. Don’t cheat — compete fairly, but Erdogan is closing his ears to these voices,” he wrote. “This is not about Ekrem Imamoglu, it’s about our country... It is about justice, democracy and freedom,” he said, as the crowd roared back: “Rights, law, justice.”
“Everywhere is Taksim, resistance is everywhere,” they chanted, referring to Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square, site of the last massive wave of protests in 2013.
The last major demonstration called by CHP was on Tuesday last week ahead of Saturday’s big rally, although students have continued to protest throughout the week. Speaking to French newspaper Le Monde, Ozel said there would be weekly rallies every Saturday in different cities across Turkey as well as a weekly Wednesday night demo in Istanbul.
“If we don’t stop this attempted coup, it will mean the end of the ballot box,” he said.
“I joined the rallies outside [Istanbul] City Hall for four days together with university students. I told them not to give in,” protester Cafer Sungur, 78, said.
“There is no other way than to keep fighting,” he said. “I was jailed in the 1970s, but back then there was justice. Today, we can’t talk about justice anymore.”
Student groups have kept up their own protests, most of them masked, in the face of a police crackdown that has seen about 2,000 people arrested.
The authorities have also cracked down on media coverage, arresting 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deporting a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arresting a Swedish reporter who flew into Istanbul to cover the unrest.
Eleven journalists were freed on Thursday, among them AFP photographer Yasin Akgul.
Swedish journalist Joakim Medin was jailed on Friday, his employer Dagens ETC said.
Reporters Without Borders’ Turkey representative Erol Onderoglu said Medin had been charged with “insulting the president” — a charge often use to silence Erdogan’s critics.
“The judicial pressure systematically brought to bear on local journalists for a long time is now being brought to bear on their foreign colleagues,” he said, two days after the deportation of BBC correspondent Mark Lowen.
Lowen said authorities had accused him of being “a threat to public order.”
Baris Altintas, codirector of Media and Law Studies Association, a legal non-governmental organization helping many of the detainees, said the authorities “seem to be very determined to limit coverage of the protests.”
“We fear the crackdown on the press will not only continue but increase,” Altintas said.
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