Hundreds of people marched briefly in Istanbul on Sunday in an LGBTQ+ pride parade, defying a ban imposed by authorities. Several of them were arrested, an AFP videographer saw.
Displaying rainbow flags and chanting various slogans, the demonstrators managed to walk for around ten minutes on Bagdad Avenue, one of the most famous arteries of the Turkish megacity, before suddenly dispersing in an attempt to to escape the police.
Several of them were arrested by the police, an AFP videographer noted.
The authorities had banned the event, as they have every year since 2015, denouncing calls for demonstrations from ‘illegal groups’.
Taksim Square cordoned off
On the other side of Istanbul, the large Taksim Square, once a hotbed of protest against the conservative Islamist regime, was sealed off on Sunday morning. In an adjoining street, police officers deployed in large numbers were filtering access to the large pedestrian Istiklal Avenue, another AFP journalist noted.
Several nearby metro stations were also closed.
‘Your thousands of police officers, your helicopters and your bans will not stop us. All the streets of this city are ours,’ the organizers of the march proclaimed in a press release.
Homosexuality is not criminally punishable in Turkey, but homophobia is widespread at the highest levels of government, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regularly calling LGBTQ+ people “perverts” and threats to the traditional family.
Until 2014, Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, saw tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ people march every year to assert their identities and express their defiance towards the Islamo-conservative government in power since 2002.
/ATS
