More than 300 people have been detained across Turkey as a result of the protests against the investigation and detention against the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, who remains in custody on charges brought by the prosecution relating to corruption offences in the Istanbul municipality and collaboration with a terrorist organisation.
‘During last night, 343 individuals were taken into custody in various cities,’ said Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, quoted by several Turkish media outlets, reiterating that authorities will not tolerate disturbances of public order: ‘Those who seek chaos and provocation through these actions will have no room to manoeuvre,’ warned Yerlikaya, who praised the police’s performance at the protests.
‘Our police officers, guardians of our calm and security, remain vigilant day and night,’ Yerlikaya emphasised. The protests have continued since Wednesday and new demonstrations have been called for this weekend, which has led the governors of other provinces such as Ankara or Izmir to decree a ban on holding protests or rallies of any kind for several days, a measure that was initially only announced for Istanbul after the arrest of İmamoğlu.
Erdoğan: ‘Turkey will not surrender to street terrorism’
Precisely in reference to the protests, during a speech on Friday on the occasion of the Nevruz celebrations, Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan criticised the attitude of the main opposition party (the CHP, to which İmamoğlu belongs) for acting ‘irresponsibly’ after the opening of the investigation against the mayor of Istanbul, assuring that ‘Turkey will not surrender to street terrorism’ that disrupts public order.
Erdoğan’s statements came after thousands of people, including CHP supporters and university students, had been demonstrating since Wednesday against İmamoğlu’s arrest in response to the call by CHP president Özgür Özel to ‘take to the streets’ and continue the protests.
‘The CHP is on the verge of losing its position as a legitimate party due to its rampant corruption, its provocative rhetoric and its links to groups outside the law,’ said the Turkish president, who urged Özel to ‘act responsibly and not provoke youngsters’. ‘Remember: the street that the CHP president is invoking is a dead end street,’ Erdoğan warned.
False: neither France nor the UK have asked their citizens to leave Turkey
Meanwhile, Turkish authorities have refuted reports in some media outlets that France and the UK have sent out alerts to their citizens to leave Turkey due to the protests. The Turkish Presidency’s Communication Agency’s centre for combating misinformation categorically denied the reports, which appear to have been spread on social networks by accounts linked to Israel.
‘Contrary to what has been said, there is no appeal issued by France or the United Kingdom to its citizens… The security forces are providing an atmosphere of peace and security (…) in the demonstrations held in some provinces due to the judicial processes initiated in our country,’ the centre said in a statement, calling on the public to be wary of “baseless claims that seek to manipulate international public opinion”.
The Spanish embassy in Ankara sent a notice to Spanish citizens in Turkey in which it simply ‘reiterated the recommendation’, addressed to both residents and tourists, to maintain an ‘attitude of caution’ and avoid ‘especially crowds of people and demonstrations’, in view of the call for several demonstrations for Friday and the weekend ‘in the city of Istanbul and in other cities in the country, such as Ankara, Konya, Izmir or Eskişehir’.
In the message, the embassy also recalled the ‘closure of various metro lines in Istanbul and the cutting off of access to the Taksim area’, but without making any high security recommendations to tourists or residents in Turkey or asking them to leave the country in the face of the protests over the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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