Protestors are being beaten with batons, and kicked and punched by police, while young students are being shot with rubber bullets – these are just some of the scenes Engin Bas has witnessed in the week of protests rocking Turkey.
Demonstrators took to the streets after the mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu, who is the main political challenger to president Recep Rayyip Erdogan, was detained last Wednesday.
Mr Bas, who has been a television journalist for 30 years and is a local of Istanbul, said he has never seen anything like it, and the protests have continued to grow in size each day.
The majority of the tens of thousands of protestors gathering in Istanbul each day have been peaceful, he said, but they’ve been met with thousands of police officers, which has led to violent clashes on the streets.
“I saw that they use batons. I saw them use fists and kicks,” he said. “I saw that they also targeted the young … with the rubber bullets,” he said.
Mr Bas has even warned colleagues with asthma to stay away from the protests because of the amount of pepper spray being used, but said the violence has not deterred the demonstrators.
He spoke with a girl who was covered in bruises from rubber bullets, but who was still preparing to go out and protest again.
“This reflects the psychology of the youngsters and university students. They’re all like this right now,” he said.
So far, more than 1,100 people have been arrested in the seven straight days of demonstrations against the president. At least seven of those were journalists, including a photographer for the news wire service AFP.
The Turkish government has also issued court orders to social media site X to shut down the accounts of more than 700 journalists, media outlets and activists – a move X has said it is fighting in court.
Can Dundar, a Turkish journalist who has been living in exile in Europe for eight years after being charged with treason in 2015, said opinion polls were showing Erdogan would not win another presidential election, so he was cracking down on free speech and democracy instead.
“He wanted to be another Putin, but the country is not ready to be another Russia,” he told The Independent. “So now the people are resisting, and Erdogan is pushing.”
Mr Dundar, who now runs the media outlet Ozguruz from Germany, said Mr Imamoglu has beaten Mr Erdogan’s party four times in local elections and was the president’s “most important rival”, but instead of going the democratic route of challenging Mr Imamoglu through elections, the president decided to imprison him instead.
“It’s a very critical point between autocracy and democracy. Either way is possible,” he said, adding that what happens next depends on the resistance.
