Turkish police on Sunday briefly detained the mothers of military cadets and newly commissioned lieutenants as they gathered in İstanbul to read a press statement calling for justice for their children, who are serving life sentences for allegedly participating in a coup attempt in Turkey in 2016.
According to the Aktif Haber news website, plainclothes officers detained several of the women as they read out a statement in the Bakırköy district on International Women’s Day. They were released shortly afterward.
Fatma Okka, who read the statement on behalf of the group, said military students aged 18 to 20 at the time could not have carried out a coup. “For us there is no Women’s Day, Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day,” she said. “Since July 15 we have been like the living dead.”
The detentions drew immediate criticism. Human rights defender and opposition lawmaker Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu condemned the police action on X, questioning how authorities could violate the women’s constitutionally protected rights to assembly and demonstration.
Lawyer Lale Demirkazan also criticized the police action, saying, “When the mothers of military students ask the government for justice, the government detains them.”
Turkey experienced a controversial military coup attempt on the night of July 15, 2016, which, according to many, was a false flag operation aimed at entrenching the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan by rooting out dissidents and eliminating powerful actors such as the military in his desire for absolute power.
The abortive putsch killed 251 people and wounded more than a thousand others. Following the coup attempt, 16,409 military cadets were expelled from their academies by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny, and 355 of them were given life sentences, with some of them overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeals.
