ISTANBUL: Police detained some 200 demonstrators in Istanbul late on Saturday after more than 3,000 women marched peacefully through the city center under tight security to mark International Women’s Day, organizers said.
For years protests have been banned in the city’s central Taksim Square, which is habitually fenced off with barriers, but the authorities have in recent years tolerated rallies nearby albeit under a heavy security presence.
The Feminist Night March rally began at sunset near Taksim Square, with many demonstrators wearing purple and waving banners with slogans including “We won’t be silenced, we’re not afraid and we won’t obey” and “Long live our feminist struggle.”
Although the march ended without incident, organizers said police then started rounding up a number of protesters, posting footage showing officers roughly dragging several demonstrators out of the crowd.
“After the #FeministNightMarch finished and the crowd dispersed without incident, the police started to detain our friends in an act of provocation,” the march organizers wrote on X.
“Nearly 200 women were unjustly detained on March 8!” they added.
There was no immediate comment from the authorities.
Earlier, several hundred demonstrators had gathered for a protest in the Kadikoy neighborhood on the Asian side of the city, also waving banners as they marched through the streets.
“With our demand for an end to violence against women, for the ratification of the Istanbul Convention against femicide... and for social policies that don’t place the burden of care on women, we are pursuing our March 8 struggle for democracy, equality, peace and fraternity,” Arzu Cerkezoglu, chairwoman of the DISK trade union, told AFP.
She was referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 2021 decision to pull Turkiye out of the Istanbul Convention, which requires countries to set up laws aimed at preventing and prosecuting violence against women.
Turkiye does not collate official figures on femicides, leaving the job to women’s organizations which collect data on murders and other suspicious deaths from press reports.
According to figures gathered by the We Will Stop Femicide Platform rights organization, at least 1,318 women have been killed by men since Turkiye withdrew from the convention in March 2021.
Some 200 detained after Istanbul Women’s Day march: organizers
https://arab.news/2mhnu
Some 200 detained after Istanbul Women’s Day march: organizers
- Although the march ended without incident, organizers said police then started rounding up a number of protesters
- “The police started to detain our friends in an act of provocation,” the march organizers wrote on X
Drone strike kills 10, including 7 children, in Sudan’s El-Obeid: medical source
- An eyewitness said the strike hit a house in the center of the army-controlled capital of North Kordofan
PORT SUDAN, Sudan: A drone strike on the Sudanese city of El-Obeid killed 10 people including seven children on Monday, a medical source told AFP.
An eyewitness said the strike hit a house in the center of the army-controlled capital of North Kordofan, which the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have sought to encircle for months.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been gripped by a war between the army and the RSF, with some of the worst violence currently unfolding in Sudan’s strategic southern Kordofan region.
El-Obeid, the region’s main city, lies on a key crossroads connecting the capital Khartoum with the vast western Darfur region — where the army lost its last major position in October.
Following its victory in Darfur, the RSF has pushed through Kordofan, seeking to recapture Sudan’s central corridor and tightening its siege with its local allies around several army-held cities.
Hundreds of thousands face mass starvation across the region.
Last year, the army broke a paramilitary siege on El-Obeid, which the RSF has sought to encircle since.
Drone strikes on Sunday caused a power outage in the city but left no reports of casualties.
Last week, a coalition of armed groups allied with the army said they had retaken several towns south of El-Obeid, which according to a military source could “open up the road between El-Obeid and Dilling” — one of South Kordofan’s besieged cities.
Since it began, the war has killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people to flee internally and across borders.
It has also created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises, and been described as a “war of atrocities” by the United Nations.
