Dozens were arrested Sunday in Istanbul during May Day celebrations, six days after Osman Kavala and seven other Turkish civil society activists were found guilty of seeking to overthrow the government.
According to a statement by the city’s governor’s office, 164 people were arrested “because of an unauthorized gathering and refusal to disperse” after trying to reach the famous Taksim Square, the center of major anti-government protests in 2013 that was closed to traffic and demonstrations.
Meanwhile, thousands of people participated in the official demonstration of trade unions and licensed professional organizations near Taksim in an area on the Asian side of the big city.
But since the beginning of the morning, riot police cordoned off large areas, which allowed to isolate Taksim on the European side of the Bosphorus, and thus prevented protesters from reaching the square, according to AFP correspondents.
May Day witnesses similar clashes annually, and Turks still remember the tragic events that took place in Taksim Square on May 1, 1977, when at least 34 demonstrators were killed and about a hundred were wounded in a shooting attributed to an extremist right-wing militia.
At the time, Turkey was witnessing a wave of political violence.
The symbolism of Taksim Square increased when it became the center of a protest movement that, in a few weeks in 2013, spread throughout the country.
The protests first began in defense of the neighboring Gezi Park under a plan to demolish it, and soon spread across the country and expanded their demands against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was then prime minister.
After nine years, the Turkish judiciary on Monday sentenced activist and dissident Osman Kavala to life imprisonment, and convicted seven other defendants who participated in protests in defense of Gezi Park to eighteen years in prison, at the end of a trial without evidence or interrogation.
Kavala, who spoke of a “judicial assassination”, was accused of seeking to “overthrow the government” while the other seven were accused of aiding him.
These rulings, which surprised lawyers and observers with their cruelty, were seen by civil society as a message aimed at thwarting any protests in the country between now until the presidential and legislative elections scheduled for June 2023.