ISTANBUL: Turkish police have detained more than 1,100 people, including journalists, since the arrest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main rival sparked the country’s worst unrest in years, a minister said on Monday.

The demonstrations began in Istanbul after Ekrem Imamoglu’s arrest last week and have since spread to more than 55 of Turkiye’s 81 provinces, sparking clashes with riot police and drawing international condemnation.

The popular 53-year-old has been widely seen as the only politician who could defeat Turkiye’s longtime leader Erdogan at the ballot box. In just four days he went from being the mayor of Istanbul — a post that launched Erdogan’s political rise decades earlier — to being arrested, interrogated, jailed and stripped of the mayorship as a result of a graft and terror probe.

On Sunday, he was overwhelmingly voted in as the main opposition CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential run, with some 15 million people casting their ballots in a show of support for Imamoglu.

Rights group says police have arrested 10 journalists ‘for covering protests’

Observers said it was the looming primary that triggered the move against Imamoglu, the main political rival of Erdogan who has dominated Turkiye’s politics since 2003, first as prime minister and then as president.

His jailing drew sharp condemnation from Germany, which called it “totally unacceptable” as Greece said moves to undermine civil liberties “cannot be tolerated”. And the EU warned Ankara it needed to demonstrate “a clear commitment to democratic norms”. Overnight, France’s foreign ministry said it was a “serious attack on democracy”. Faced with the massive protests, Turkiye’s authorities sought to shut down more than 700 accounts on X, the online platform said on Sunday.

‘We cannot remain silent’

On Monday, students at the main universities in Istanbul and Ankara called for a boycott of lectures. Young protesters were also preparing to hold a rally at 1400 GMT by Besiktas port on the Bosphorus, ahead of the main nightly rally outside City Hall at 1730 GMT.

Sunday night’s gathering descended into fierce clashes with riot police kicking and beating people in Istanbul, agency correspondents said. Before dawn on Monday, police detained 10 Turkish journalists at home, including an agency photographer, “for covering the protests”, the MLSA rights group said.

Most of them were covering the mass demonstrations outside City Hall, it said, in a move denounced by Imamoglu’s wife. “What is being done to members of the press and journalists is a matter of freedom. None of us can remain silent about this,” wrote Dilek Kaya Imamoglu on X.

Since Wednesday, police had detained more than 1,133 people for “illegal activities”, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Monday. Among them were two lawyers who were defending protesters detained by the police, the Bar Association in the western coastal city of Izmir said.

Imamoglu — who has denounced the judicial moves against him as a political “execution without trial” — sent a defiant message from jail via his lawyers. “I wear a white shirt that you cannot stain. I have a strong arm that you cannot twist. I won’t budge an inch.

Published in Dawn, March 25th, 2025