ISTANBUL: Turkish police have detained hundreds of workers protesting over labor conditions at Istanbul’s new airport, a giant project championed by President Tayyip Erdogan and due to open next month, a union leader said on Saturday.
The protest broke out after a shuttle bus accident on Friday in which 17 workers were injured, said Ozgur Karabulut, general manager of the Dev Yapi-Is union.
Thousands of workers joined the demonstration, which was broken up by police and gendarmes deploying in riot control vehicles and firing tear gas, he said.
“They broke into the workers’ camp with 30 gendarmerie, broke down the doors and detained around 500 workers,” Karabulut told Reuters by phone. He said he was speaking from a local gendarmerie where he was seeking the workers’s release.
Opposition parliamentarian Ali Bayar, from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), put the number of those detained at around 400.
The workers’ quarters “look like a detention camp...When we went there this morning gendermarie soldiers were still detaining workers,” Bayar told Reuters.
The new airport, which Turkey says will become the biggest in the world, is one of the showcase projects of a 15-year construction boom under Erdogan who has overseen building of bridges, ports and railways which have transformed the country.
The growth has been fueled by cheap debt, however, and Erdogan said on Friday the government is freezing new investments to rein in inflation and support the lira, which has lost 40 percent against the dollar this year.
The airport is scheduled to open at the end of October, but Karabulut said that was in doubt because the remaining work would take another two months.
Unions have long complained about working conditions and labor safety at the airport, but under a state of emergency imposed after a failed 2016 military coup and only lifted in July, rights to strike or protest were curtailed.
In February, Turkey’s labor ministry said 27 workers had died at the airport since the start of work there in 2015, mainly from work accidents or health problems.
Workers have also complained about poor food at the site, bed bugs in their sleeping quarters and delayed salaries. Pictures they posted online showed cracks in the ceilings and walls of the container homes where they are housed.
Airport operator IGA said its CEO Kadri Samsunlu had met union representatives and was looking into their complaints.
Karabulut said the union had received only verbal pledges from IGA and wanted commitments in writing. But he said many workers were unable to continue protesting.
“Most of them had to go to work today under pressure and under threat,” he said. “So they went to work today unwillingly but they want the public to know that they will be protesting tonight if their friends are not released.”
Turkish police detain hundreds of protesting airport workers
Turkish police detain hundreds of protesting airport workers
- The protest broke out after a shuttle bus accident on Friday in which 17 workers were injured.
- Thousands of workers joined the demonstration, which was broken up by police and gendarmes deploying in riot control vehicles and firing tear gas.
NGOs condemn settler attack on activists in West Bank
- Herzog said on X he strongly condemned the violence that “stands in complete opposition to the values of the State of Israel“
- The attack occurred in the Palestinian village of Qusra in the northern West Bank
JERUSALEM: Two Israeli NGOs denounced an attack Friday in which settlers used sticks to beat two activists in the occupied West Bank, calling the incident “state violence” and “Jewish terrorism.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on X he strongly condemned the violence that “stands in complete opposition to the values of the State of Israel.”
“This serious incident adds to a series of recent... unacceptable events that harm, above all, the (West Bank colonization) enterprise and the reputation of the State of Israel,” he added.
The attack occurred in the Palestinian village of Qusra in the northern West Bank.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released a video filmed by one of the activists, which showed at least four masked men armed with sticks jumping out of a four-wheel drive vehicle that arrived at high speed.
Someone was then heard yelling “No, please, no” in Hebrew, followed by thuds and cries of pain, before the attackers departed.
Two people were left on the ground, one of them motionless and stretched out face down with a bleeding head.
Israeli emergency service Magen David Adom said the two wounded individuals, who are in their fifties, were taken by helicopter to a hospital in Israel.
The Israeli military said it was searching for suspects.
Excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, more than 500,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements and outposts, which are illegal under international law.
Around three million Palestinians live in the territory, which Israel has occupied since 1967.
In recent months, attacks attributed to Israeli settlers have multiplied in the West Bank, targeting Palestinians, Israeli and foreign anti-settlement activists and sometimes Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli government, considered one of the most right-wing in the country’s history, has fast-tracked settlement expansion.
B’Tselem said “the unrestrained attacks carried out by settlers throughout the West Bank constitute state violence.”
“They are carried out with full backing, participation, and assistance from state authorities, as part of a strategy of Israel’s apartheid regime seeking to advance and complete the takeover of Palestinian land,” it added.
Avi Dabush, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, said “the blood of our friends is on the hands of those who support and finance Jewish terrorism, either directly, through the government or by turning a blind eye.”
He also condemned “the army’s impotence” in a statement that called on “Israeli society to pull itself together ... in order to put an end to this endemic terrorism.”
