Turkey experiences biggest unrest in a decade
Newshour
BBC
4.4 • 984 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Turkey's interior ministry says 1,133 people have been detained after days of protests against the arrest last week of Istanbul's popular mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, on corruption charges. More than 70 demonstrators were detained overnight outside Istanbul. Police also arrested a number of left-wing politicians, lawyers and at least 10 journalists in pre-dawn raids. Also in the programme: US negotiators are meeting their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia, as part of Donald Trump's push for a quick end to the war in Ukraine; and the DNA testing firm 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US - so could customers' genetic data get into the wrong hands? (Photo: A person holds a flower towards police officers, during a protest on the day Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was jailed as part of a corruption investigation, in Istanbul, Turkey, March 23, 2025. Reuters/Alexandros Avramidis)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.9 | I'm Celia Hatton and I'm coming to you live from our studio in central London. |
| 0:11.2 | Coming up a little later in the program. |
| 0:14.4 | It's a new family member. |
| 0:15.8 | She's an aunt to my children, a friend to my wife. |
| 0:19.0 | It's really amazing. |
| 0:20.7 | Something that just happens in the movies, |
| 0:22.5 | I guess. That's an advert for the DNA testing firm 23 and me. Everyone has a DNA story, |
| 0:31.5 | is the tagline, but now the company is filing for bankruptcy. What will happen to customers' genetic data now. |
| 0:40.0 | But first, our top story on NewsHour today, we begin in Turkey. |
| 0:50.2 | That's the sound of crowd chaos in one of Europe's biggest cities in Istanbul. |
| 0:55.9 | The popping noises you can hear are the sounds of police using tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray |
| 1:01.8 | to try to repel thousands of angry protesters. |
| 1:06.1 | And perhaps it tells us just how angry they are over the arrest of Turkey's main opposition figure, Ekram Imamolu, |
| 1:13.7 | to hear that the police tactics have done little to stop the demonstrations from continuing. |
| 1:18.4 | They brought many parts of this city of 16 million to a standstill. |
| 1:23.0 | These protesters explained why they're taking part. |
| 1:26.0 | We have right to vote. We have right to choose whoever we want to rule us. |
| 1:30.6 | We want democracy. We want the people to choose the elected. And we want the free will to choose |
| 1:37.0 | who we want without them being in prison. And it's not just Istanbul. protests have broken out in |
| 1:42.3 | more than two-thirds of Turkey's provinces. |
| 1:45.4 | The widening political turmoil is jangling nerves outside of Turkey, too. It's a pivotal |
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