Activists and scholars have warned that a coordinated wave of police raids on LGBTQ+ activists, organisations and venues across Turkey marks a break with the past, and may signal a wider push against civil society and the opposition.
Activists and scholars have warned that a coordinated wave of police raids on LGBTQ+ activists, organisations and venues across Turkey marks a break with the past, and may signal a wider push against civil society and the opposition.
Speaking at an online panel co-sponsored by the LGBTQA Caucus of the International Studies Association, Yıldız Tar, editor-in-chief of the LGBTQ+ news outlet Kaos GL, said the operations had no precedent in the country’s queer history.
“We cannot just compare it to any other events,” Tar said. “This is a new level of oppression. This is beyond scapegoating.”
Raids in multiple cities
The operations began around the anniversary of the 12 September 1980 military coup, with police carrying out simultaneous raids in at least fifteen cities. Officers searched the homes of LGBTQ+ activists, trans people and sex workers, and targeted gay bars, cafés and their owners.
According to figures compiled by Kaos GL, 117 people were detained. Around 83 of them have since been placed in pretrial detention. About 23 are activists, and the rest include trans women, sex workers and the owners of bars and cafés.
The charges vary from city to city. In Ankara, members of Kaos GL’s board and supervisory committee were jailed on obscenity grounds linked to articles the outlet had published. These included a story featuring two actresses kissing, a piece on homophobia in sport, and an interview with an LGBTQ+ organisation in Georgia illustrated with a photograph of two men kissing.
In Istanbul, police detained founding members of four LGBTQ+ organisations and two HIV organisations. Tar said officials told the media that receiving funding from the European Union was itself a crime. He pointed out that EU and UN funding in Turkey mostly goes to state bodies, including the ministries of justice, family and interior affairs, as well as government-aligned NGOs.
“It’s legal for them,” he said. “It’s illegal for LGBTQIA people.”
Reports of ill-treatment
Tar described harsh conditions for those in custody. In Ankara, three detainees were verbally abused and threatened by prison guards, who called them child molesters, before being moved to another prison over safety concerns. A trans man on Kaos GL’s board was strip-searched. Two others were forcibly taken for drug tests that had nothing to do with the case against them. Some detainees are being held in single cells and are allowed outside for one hour a day.
He said that even under the harshest sentence the charges allow, most detainees would serve about a month in an open prison. Instead they are being held in closed prisons with no indictment and no court date.
“It can take months, and that is very infuriating,” he said.
Kaos GL has launched a “We Want Freedom” campaign and is working to build coalitions with other parts of Turkish society.
“Not just for the show”
Evren Savcı of Yale University said LGBTQ+ people in Turkey had been openly targeted since 2015, when the Istanbul Pride March was first banned. Bans were later extended to the Trans Pride March and other Pride Week events.
Until now, Savcı said, the repression had largely been a performance aimed at the government’s voter base. “If they truly wanted to round up all the people who write and who think and who organise, it would be very easy to find a lot of us,” she said. “But they don’t do that. The bars are open, people are writing, books are being sold.” That, she said, “clearly has changed with this incident.”
Why now?
The panellists offered several explanations for the timing. Tar linked the crackdown to the start of the ruling AKP’s campaign for elections expected in about a year and a half, in which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is expected to stand again.
She also pointed to Erdoğan’s recent address to the UN General Assembly, where he raised what Turkish officials call “gender neutralisation”. Tar described this as a message to Muslim-majority states and to the United States, Russia and China, which she said share a hostility to LGBTQ+ rights.
Economic pressures play a part too. Tar argued that as the government cuts social spending, including support for childcare and elder care, it is shifting those burdens onto families and needs to present the family as strong and under threat.
She also described the queer movement as a “laboratory” for state power. The 2015 Pride ban came just weeks after the pro-Kurdish HDP’s breakthrough in that year’s general election, and was followed by what she called a decade of darkness, including a state of emergency and mass imprisonment. “Now we are on the verge of another dark period,” she said.
Sinan Birdal of the Free University of Berlin noted that the operations came at roughly the same time as the liquidation of 131 funds operating on the Istanbul Stock Exchange, some of them linked to AKP figures, involving around $17 billion. One reading, he said, was that the crackdown served as a cover for a financial scandal.
He also connected it to the peace process between the Turkish state and the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. Senior figures in the pro-Kurdish movement have described the raids as an obstacle to the talks. Birdal argued the government was using the issue as a wedge to divide both the Kurdish movement and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which he said had criticised how the operations were carried out but had not yet spoken up substantively for LGBTQ+ rights.
He placed the raids alongside the jailing of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and the moves against opposition-run district municipalities, calling them part of an effort to stamp out urban opposition. “Now the target is not only political parties or municipalities,” he said. “They’re moving towards civil society organisations.”
Birdal said that when the justice minister announced the operation on social media, he cited no criminal law. He referred instead to two policy documents: the Ministry of Family and Social Services’ 2026–2035 family and population vision document, which names “gender neutralisation” and “gender ideology” as threats, and a presidential circular issued this year that puts the vision into practice across state institutions.
Savcı said the crackdown worked as intimidation of other social groups and as a signal to authoritarian governments elsewhere. She also argued it helps fragment opposition to the government, which she said has not held a majority since 2015. “You put away some people for terrorism, some for drugs and prostitution,” she said. “The issues seem really divided when there’s an entire social body that is against this kind of government.”
Calls for solidarity
Tar said protests had taken place in more than 60 cities around the world in the past week, which had been inspiring for activists in Turkey. He urged people abroad to press MPs, MEPs and local officials to respond.
He criticised the EU for staying silent, while noting that the Council of Europe had expressed concern. Her request was simple: that the EU publish transparent data on who it funds in Turkey, including government ministries. “If getting funding from the EU is a crime, then the EU is a criminal organisation in the eyes of Turkey,” he said.
Tar pushed back against the idea that Turkish society is uniformly hostile. He cited a national survey from two years ago in which 39 per cent of respondents supported equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, around 30 per cent were indifferent, and only about 30 per cent were opposed. Government-backed rallies for the family had drawn far smaller crowds than hoped, he said. “They couldn’t do it by societal means. Now they’re trying to do it by political institutions.”
Savcı warned that legal aid from abroad could be used against detainees in court, and said political pressure from governments with ties to Turkey was likely to be the most effective response.
Tar said draft anti-LGBTQ+ legislation had been floated twice and could return. But he argued the raids showed the government believed it could act without a new law, and that no one would object.
“If someone says no,” he said, “that can create an impact.”