An immense crowd, tinged with the red of the Turkish flag, gathered on Saturday March 29 in Istanbul. Tens of thousands of people, according to our colleagues from RFIresponded to the CHP call, the opposition party of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, arrested and imprisoned last weekend. Özgur Özel, chief of the CHP party and organizer of the demonstration, said that the crowd had 2.2 million people, but the France Press agency was unable to confirm these figures independently.
Faced with popular anger that rumbles, Turkish authorities are trying to repress dissident voices. Friday, Ekrem Imamoglu, the main rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced the arrest of his main lawyer, released later in the day under judicial supervision. “This time it was my lawyer Mehmet Pehlivan who was arrested for invented reasons from scratch,” said the mayor of Istanbul, an opposition figure dismissed from his duties on Sunday and imprisoned for “corruption”.
Arrested journalists
The TGS journalists’ union announced for its part the arrest at the dawn of two left -wing media reporters critical of power, faced with an unprecedented challenge since the Great GEZI Movement in 2013, who has started from Istanbul’s Taksim Square. “Let the journalists do their job. Stop these illegal detentions,” insurgerated the union. A Swedish journalist, Joakim Medin, arrested Thursday when he arrived in Turkey where he was to cover the demonstrations shaking the country, was placed in detention, said the editor-in-chief of his newspaper Dagens UTCAndreas Gustavsson, Friday evening at AFP. The authorities also expelled a BBC journalist Mark Lowen on Thursday, who came to cover demonstrations in the country.
Thursday, eight journalists, including an AFP photographer were released after being arrested on Monday. They were accused of having participated in a prohibited demonstration that they covered as a journalist. The NGO Reporters Without Borders said it was “relieved” by the announcement of the release of journalists, demanding that of the other two still in the hands of the authorities in Izmir.
Arbitrary arrests
In addition, the Turkish government announced nearly 2,000 arrests on Thursday since March 19, during demonstrations prohibited by the authorities. Among those arrested, 260 had been imprisoned Thursday, according to the Interior Ministry. Many demonstrators, mostly young, were arrested at home or during rallies and sent to prison, according to lawyers.
This is among others the case of a 23 -year -old economy student that AFP had met on his campus in Istanbul, one of his friends told AFP by expressing “many arrests” among their comrades. “These arrests are arbitrary,” said Musa Akyol, the father of a 21 -year -old student arrested on Sunday in Istanbul and imprisoned since Wednesday, saying that they are worried about “all these young people who only dream of a better Turkey”. According to the Istanbul bar, twenty minors were arrested between March 22 and 25, of which seven were still detained on Friday.
The Minister of Justice Yilmaz Tunç justified the wave of arrests by “the violence” which the arrested persons showed. In the corruption investigation which applies to the mayor and several dozen other people to be imprisoned, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that “other big radishes (would) get out of the bag”, suggesting new investigations and new arrests. But the authorities target all the votes they deem criticism: the High Turkish Audiovisual Council imposed on Thursday ten days of interruption of programs in Sözcü TV, a chain close to the opposition, for “incitement to hatred and hostility”, announcing having sanctioned three others.