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The imprisonment of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the far-right president's top political rival, has unleashed a new wave of protests against increasingly autocratic rule.
International outrage and charges of "viciousness" and "outright autocracy" have followed Sunday's imprisonment of Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's top political rival, the popular Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who is seen as Erdogan's likeliest opposition challenger in upcoming national elections.
The corruption charges levied against İmamoğlu, a member of the Republican People's Party (CHP), are seen as politically motivated and follow days of sustained protests by opposition voices opposed to Erdoğan's increasingly authoritarian rule.
Tens of thousands marched and clashed with riot police after fresh protests erupted Sunday in Istanbul and elsewhere in the country following the court's actions against İmamoğlu and on Monday, the CHP announced that nearly 15 million people, members and non-members alike, participated in national primaries to support the jailed mayor's candidacy to face off against Erdoğan in the next election.
The non-member vote of more than 13 million, "could indicate," reportsNBC News, "that İmamoğlu, 54, enjoys wide public support beyond the party faithful. The party's chairman said it showed the need for early elections."
Writing for Politico Europe, opinion editor Jamie Dettmer argues that that timing of Erdoğan's targeting of İmamoğlu has everything to do with the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the international scene.
Erdoğan, Dettmer wrote on Saturday, "has spent years eroding democracy, stifling dissent and purging the country's army and civil service. Now, it looks as though he's chosen this geopolitical moment to bury the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secular founder of the Republic of Turkey." He continued:
Erdoğan would harbor no worries as to Trump’s disapproval. The two have lavished priase on each other for years, and the Turkish leader has said he supports his American counterpart’s peace initiative in Ukraine—no doubt music to Trump’s ears.
Erdoğan isn't alone among the once embattled autocrats—and would-be autocrats—sniffing the change in the geopolitical air, and reckoning they're on the cusp of a new era, able to erase the rules and norms of old and replace them with ones more to their liking. It's influencing their behavior as they look to each other for inspiration and new ideas for running their respective countries—whether it be weaponizing policies affecting sexual minorities, scapegoating migrants, sharpening attacks on independent media, transforming public broadcasters into government mouthpieces or just closing them down.
Since his arrest on March 19, the ousted mayor has denied all charges against him and urged his supporters to continue protests in the face of the government crackdown.
"I totally believe these are bogus charges," Emre Can Erdogdu, a university student in Istanbul who attended street protests Sunday night, told the New York Times. "We entirely lost our trust in the government."
Erdogdu said he feared for the future of Turkey. "A person who could be the next president is now out of politics. It is not just about Istanbul. It is about all of Turkey."
A Turkish court jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, President Erdogan's main rival, pending trial on corruption charges triggering the country's biggest protests in over a decade https://t.co/7P7PwrjZsi pic.twitter.com/e05k1sERXI
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 24, 2025
Özgür Özel, the CHP chair, said the imprisonment would not dampen the party's prospects, but only further ignite the growing opposition. "Starting from tomorrow morning," he said from Istanbul on Sunday evening, "we will initiate a great struggle by harnessing the power of organization and using this strength for the good sake of all of us."
He called for "all democrats and all those who care the future of Turkey" to come out in sustained protest.
According to the Hürriyet Daily News, over 1,100 people have been arrested since mass protests erupted last week over İmamoğlu's initial arrest. Criticism only grew the court on Sunday stripped him of his position and sent him to prison.
"By arresting his main political rival," said human rights advocate and scholar Kenneth Roth, "Erdoğan shows he is too fearful of losing to risk even a managed election."
Roth said Erdoğan, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, would rather "opt for an electoral charade" than hold free and fair elections.
Turkish protesters demand "freedom" as police fire rubber bullets and pepper spray at crowds rallying for detained Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.https://t.co/r7gKpPg0YJ pic.twitter.com/HqAL3Z4kay
— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 24, 2025
With Turkish officials set to visit the United States this week to visit with U.S. counterparts, world's richest man Elon Musk, who has taken a seat as a top advisor to Trump, is under fire for blocking accounts of opposition figures in Turkey on his social media platform X.
As Politicoreported over the weekend:
The majority of the suspended accounts were "university-associated activist accounts, basically sharing protest information, locations for students to go," Yusuf Can,coordinator and analyst at the Wilson Center's Middle East Program, told POLITICO. Many of these accounts are "grassroots activists" with their followings in the low tens of thousands, said Can.
Some accounts appear to be suspended only in Turkey and not in the rest of the world. Activist Ömer Faruk Aslan created a second account to avoid censorship. "Yesterday, my account was blocked by a court order because the tweets exceeded 6 million views," he posted.
Last week, Human Rights Watch said that İmamoğlu's arrest, as well as the targeting of other opposition figures, was politically motivated and an assault on the rule of law.
"Ekrem İmamoğlu and others detained should be released from police custody immediately," said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director for the group. "The Erdoğan presidency should ensure that the results of the Istanbul municipal elections are respected and that the criminal justice system is not weaponized for political ends."
One group noted that Israel "bombs hospitals, kills healthcare workers, blocks medicine, and destroys clinics—leaving Palestinians without treatment as disease spreads, starvation worsens, and people suffer."
U.S.-backed Israeli forces drew international condemnation Friday after bombing the only cancer hospital in the Gaza Strip, where more than 700 Palestinians including over 200 children have been killed this week and where the death toll from 532 days of genocidal assault is approaching at least 50,000.
Israel Defense Forces troops carried out an airstrike on the abandoned Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in Gaza's Netzarim Corridor, where the IDF launched what it called a "limited ground operation" earlier this week amid a ferocious wave of airstrikes that have killed at least 700 Palestinians, including 200 children and 112 women, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. More than 900 other Palestinians have been injured since Israel unilaterally broke a cease-fire.
Today, Israeli occupation forces blew up Gaza’s Turkish Friendship Hospital. It was the last hospital in Gaza that was able to treat cancer patients. This is a US-backed war crime.
[image or embed]
— CODEPINK ( @codepink.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 8:01 AM
"The ministry emphasizes that this criminal behavior of the occupation comes in line with the systematic destruction of the health system and the completion of the episodes of genocide," the Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement, adding that the renewed Israeli slaughter has brought the overall Gaza death toll since October 2023 to at least 49,617, with upward of 112,950 others injured, and approximately 14,000 more missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble.
The effects of Israel's bombing and invasion—which include widespread starvation and sickness—have been exacerbated by the "completem siege" imposed on Gaza in October 2023 and the forced displacement of around 2 million Palestinians.
The IDF said it bombed the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital because Hamas, which rules Gaza and carried out the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, was using the facility as "terrorist infrastructure." No evidence was provided to support this allegation; past Israeli claims of this nature have been
debunked.
In fact, the IDF had used the facility as a base from which snipers indiscriminately shot Palestinians including women and children who tried to cross what Israeli soldiers and veterans described as a "kill zone." One IDF veteran said that these random slayings have become "a competition between units" to see who can kill more people.
Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—which was built using a $34 million donation from Turkey—was the only one in Gaza equipped to treat cancer patients, although the facility had not been used as a hospital for over a year. Prior to Israel's onslaught, the hospital provided critical treatment to thousands of cancer patients.
In a statement Friday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned Israel's latest hospital bombing.
"The deliberate targeting of a hospital providing healthcare services to civilians in Gaza is part of Israel's policy to render Gaza unlivable and force the Palestinian people into displacement," the ministry asserted, according toHürriyet Daily News. "We urge the international community to take firm and effective steps against Israel's unlawful attacks and systematic state terrorism."
Israeli forces have obliterated Gaza's medical infrastructure along with the rest of the densely populated strip. Last year, an independent United Nations commission found that "Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities."
The report detailed hundreds of IDF attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities and the killing or wounding of around 1,700 medical workers, calling such killings "widespread and systematic."
Israel is the subject of an ongoing
genocide case brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague by South Africa. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are also wanted by the International Criminal Court, also in The Hague, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
The Arab East must no longer be a playground for non-Arabs to compete for their own ends.
There’s no two ways about it, the Arab East is a mess. It is weak, divided, directionless, locked in multiple conflicts, and not in control of its own destiny. This isn’t new. It’s been this way for a century, with non-Arab powers preying off the region in pursuit of their own aspirations. This has been playing out in four major periods that define the Arab East’s plight during the last century. While the players dominating Arab history have changed over time, the constant is that Arabs have been the victims of manipulation by others.
One century ago, the Arab East was caught between the colonial designs and greed of the British and French. At stake was control of oil, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal. These colonial powers carved up the region creating states out of whole cloth with imposed forms of governance, planting the seeds of conflict that have born bitter fruit since that time. Palestinians were dispossessed and dispersed to make way for a Western client-state in Israel. The Kurds were cut off from one another under the control of four rival states. The French ushered in a sectarian state in Lebanon with their favored sects in control, while Syria and Iraq had imposed monarchies which ultimately gave way to ideological military coups that masked sectarianism.
During the Cold War, the Arab East became one of many platforms worldwide for competition between the US and the Soviet Union. While the Soviets were the patron of the region’s “revolution movements” and “anti-imperialist” military regimes, the US cultivated its client-state Israel, allies among the monarchies wanting stability, and sectarian groups seeking to preserve their positions of influence.
At the Cold War’s end, and especially after 9/11, the US seriously overplayed its hand with its invasion and occupation of Iraq, ideology-driven advocacy of democratization, and total embrace and empowerment of Israeli ambitions. The result was two-fold: the diminished role of the US, which lost treasure, troops, and prestige while on this fool’s errand to create a client-state in Iraq; and the emboldening of non-Arab regional powers who saw an opportunity to expand their influence over this region.
And so here we are today in the wake of wars in Gaza and Lebanon and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. While the Russians and the US still have their hands in the pot, it’s clear that the region’s newly emergent overseers are now, to different degrees, the non-Arab states of Israel, Iran, and Turkey.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounds megalomaniacal in describing his country’s dominant regional role, while ignoring the reality that Israel is only in its position because of massive supplies of US weapons, back-up military assets, and political support. He claims to be fighting and winning on seven fronts, saving the West from the scourge of Islamic extremism. He is operating without restraint, genocidally transforming much of Gaza into a no-man’s land, with permanent bases as signs of permanent conquest. Israeli forces are doing much the same in Syria and, despite an internationally accepted ceasefire with Lebanon, Israel has already made clear that it will violate the terms of the agreement by retaining a presence in the south of Lebanon.
Iran, undoubtedly weakened by its losses, especially in Lebanon and Syria, may be down, but it’s not out. It retains the support of significant groups in Lebanon and some in Syria, not to mention its deep penetration into Iraq and Yemen.
Iran may have lost its lynchpin, Syria, and with that a weakening of its axis of resistance, but Turkey and its support for the region’s Islamic movements has emerged as the new factor in that country’s and the Arab East’s political equation. The impact of this development on empowering or emboldening ideological Muslim affiliates in neighboring states is not yet clear. Nor do we know how religious or ethnic minority communities will be impacted by or react. But it’s not unreasonable for them to be wary of what some fear are Turkey’s Ottoman Empire-like ambitions.
At the same time, the fate of the two major victims of the British/French machinations, the Palestinians and the Kurds, remain both unresolved and impossible to ignore.
The Kurdish nation was forcibly separated into four portions and incorporated into Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Today’s major flashpoint is between the Kurdish region of Syria, backed by the US, facing resistance by Turkey who sees its independence as threatening their continued control of the Kurdish community in Turkey. It’s a flare-up waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, Israel’s projection of regional power remains challenged by their continuing genocide in Gaza and intensified oppression of Palestinians in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. This situation not only fuels greater Palestinian resistance, but also contributes to Israel’s isolation among Arabs and much of the rest of the world.
Some continue to blame the Arabs of the East for this sorry state of affairs, finding fault with their sectarianism or absence of leadership. This, however, is akin to blaming the victims. The divisions that exist are the result of external manipulation. And in the past, when movements emerged to create broadly-based unity based on a non-sectarian identity, external forces moved to crush or exploit them.
It's high time for the Arabs to take control of their destiny. The Arab East must no longer be a playground for non-Arabs to compete for their own ends. One place to start would be for the Gulf Arab states, the apparent locus of Arab strength these days, to convene a summit and lay out a vision for the future coupled with demands:
- a hands off policy for non-Arab states, with the threat that future relations will depend on adherence to this goal;
- a vision of non-sectarian Arab unity within each of the Mashreq’s states;
- an end to Israeli occupation, expansionism, and aggression against multiple Arab states;
- full self-determination for the Palestinian people and an end of the regional countries’ denial of the rights of the Kurdish people; and
- the creation of working groups to study the steps necessary to make these goals possible.
Some may dismiss this as a pipe dream. It won’t happen overnight because much accrued damage must be undone. But if a new vision isn’t developed, backed up by steps to translate it into reality, the region will continue to hobble along crippled by division and external manipulation.