2 days ago
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When 21-year-old Berkay Gezgin left the interior of Istanbul city hall, a squad of police was waiting for him outside. Protests that flooded the streets outside the headquarters of his political hero, detained mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, had begun trickling away by midnight, but hundreds of riot police remained clustered around the municipality building.
Gezgin became the face of youth support for İmamoğlu when he met him on the campaign trail during his first run for mayor in 2019, coining the slogan “Everything will be fine”, which the Istanbul mayor later used in his campaign.
As Gegzin left city hall and looked for his parked motorcycle, the young student was snatched by waiting security forces and bundled into a police car.
His lawyer, Cemil Çiçek, believes the police targeted him for arrest: “They knew who they were arresting and that he has a lot of youth support. We think he was jailed to send a message to people not to protest, not to go into the street, [to say]: if this guy can be jailed, so can you. Two hundred other people were detained on the same day, so maybe now parents will warn their kids against protesting.”
The baby-faced student became one of almost 2,000 people detained in just one week as the Turkish authorities clamped down hard on the largest anti-government protests to sweep the country in years.
A longtime rival of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, İmamoğlu was accused of corruption, removed from office by the interior ministry and sent to the infamous high-security Silivri prison on the edge of Istanbul. This happened on the same day his party officially declared him a presidential nominee.
Erdoğan has frequently lashed out at the protests, calling them “a movement of violence”, and accusing his main political opponent, the Republican People’s party (CHP), of “shielding those who attack police with stones and axes”, pointing to more than 120 police officers injured during demonstrations.
“Courts held those accountable who committed treason against the national will, and will do so in the future,” he said. “The judiciary will hold those behind any sabotage against the Turkish economy and the wellbeing of the nation accountable.”
A week after the mayor was detained, Istanbul’s prisons were full, and those rounded up at protests are now being transferred to facilities outside the city, the opposition alleges.
Gezgin was taken to a nearby police station along with dozens of others. “They kept him and more than 50 people in detention for four days in that police station. They were not told the charges against them,” said Çiçek.
“As a lawyer, I never saw anything like this before in my life. All of them held in that jail are students and none of them are guilty of anything. Their only crime was protesting, attending a completely legal gathering. This is not a crime under our constitution.”
The recent wave of arrests targeted protesters, journalists who covered the demonstrations, municipal workers and even Imamoğlu’s lawyer. Last week, members of a teaching union were put under house arrest pending trial after they stopped work in solidarity with protesting students.
Ten photojournalists were detained in pre-dawn raids on their homes, with most of them jailed on charges of breaking laws governing protest. They were released some days later, only for two other journalists to be detained the following day.
BBC correspondent Mark Lowen was arrested at his hotel, held for 17 hours and deported back to London after covering the demonstrations. Turkey’s presidential communications directorate said his deportation was due to his lack of press credentials.
The crackdown on protesters grew alongside increasing scenes of police violence against demonstrators. Human Rights Watch described how officers struck protesters with batons and kicked them as they lay on the ground, while security forces “indiscriminately used pepper spray, teargas, plastic bullets and water cannon against protesters, causing numerous injuries”.
Turkish authorities also took steps to ensure such scenes were not visible to the wider public. Ankara’s media watchdog, RTÜK, served one opposition channel with a 10-day broadcasting ban, while other networks that showed live footage of the demonstrations were fined and told to stop airing some programmes.
The country’s justice minister, Yılmaz Tunç, defended the investigation into İmamoğlu at a press conference earlier last week, saying: “We don’t want any politician to be arrested, but if there is a suspicion, then the judiciary decides.”
He added: “These are serious accusations,” pointing to the large numbers of suspects. “In this situation, where someone is suspected of committing a crime, to eliminate this suspicion the efforts should be in front of the judiciary and not in the streets.”
As Tunç spoke to journalists from a grand Ottoman-era palace, Gezgin was shivering inside a prisonless than an hour away. A day earlier, he had appeared in court, his dark curls framing his clearly shaken expression as he received a brief hug from Ali Mahir Başarır, deputy chair of the CHP group in parliament, who called him “the hope of millions”.
“You are taking revenge on that young man – you can’t judge hope!” he posted on social media The following day, he posted a video of another mass rally outside Istanbul city hall, quoting Gezgin: “Everything will be fine.”
Gezgin has been accused of “insulting the president” and “resisting the police”. Çiçek pointed out that the 21-year-old was not at the demonstrations, as he was inside the municipality building at the time, and that a notorious incident where a crowd of protesters cursed Erdoğan’s family members occurred two days after his detention.
In a grim twist of fate, the lawyer now believes that Gezgin will also be sent to Silivri prison, facing the possibility of months in pre-trial detention.
“He loves İmamoğlu and he’ll meet him in jail,” he said. “He is young, but very brave.”
