Turkey's NATO Summit Bought a Two-Week License to Erase Queer Life

Ankara hosted NATO's July summit under the banner of Western security. In the two weeks before Trump and thirty-one other heads of state landed, Turkish police detained more than 225 people in dawn raids across the capital — lawyers, academics, feminists, labour organisers, and Yıldız Tar, editor-in-chief of the queer news outlet Kaos GL, pulled in one day before a scheduled hearing in a separate case against his own publication. The Ankara governor's office banned all public gatherings, leafleting, and banners for thirteen days. A cruise ship carrying LGBTQ+ passengers was turned away at port because, officials said, those aboard held values "incompatible with Turkish society."

None of this is new, and that is the point. Istanbul Pride has been banned since 2015. In 2022, riot police arrested nearly 400 people who tried to march anyway. This June, the 24th Istanbul Pride went ahead despite the ban and the NATO lockdown, and police detained dozens more — Bianet counted 65, Kaos GL counted 52, including an AFP photographer. Weeks earlier, a separate operation styled "My Family Is Safe" hit LGBTQ+ organisations and businesses in twelve provinces, arresting at least 47 people and blocking dozens of queer websites, KaosGL.org among them. The pattern is not escalation around one event. It is a standing infrastructure of criminalisation that gets switched on whenever the state needs a show of order — a NATO summit, a Pride march, a news cycle.

What makes this worth naming clearly: Turkey is not improvising repression, it is legislating it. An 11th Judicial Package draft has proposed criminalising conduct "contrary to biological sex and general morality" and raising the minimum age for legal gender transition from 18 to 25. A court in Izmir ordered the dissolution of the Genç LGBTI+ Association this year for "obscenity," reading a country's constitution to mean that a youth group discussing same-sex relationships threatens the family as a constitutional institution. This is the same authoritarian architecture routinely bolted onto every other form of dissent in Turkey — Kurdish organising, labour unions, socialist and academic circles are all metabolised through the same anti-terror statutes used against queer activists this summer.

And Turkey's Western partners keep RSVPing anyway. NATO did not relocate its summit, nor did any member state walk out over the raids. The EU's own spokesperson called the arrests "concerning" — the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug — while treating Turkey as a functioning candidate for accession. Human Rights Watch called the crackdown a contradiction of the alliance's founding principles; the alliance held its photo op regardless. This is what "strategic ally" means in practice: a government can jail journalists, dissolve associations, and turn away a cruise ship for who is aboard it, and still get NATO's flags hung in its capital. Solidarity with Turkey's queer, feminist, and labour left cannot wait for governments that treat repression as a line item to manage around a summit schedule. It has to come from the people who actually show up when the state tries to make existing in public a crime.

Sources

Bytes Europe: Turkey clamps down on NGOs, activists ahead of NATO summit
News Insider USA: Turkey crackdown ahead of NATO summit
Newscord: Istanbul Pride march suppressed, 54+ detained
LGBTQ Nation: Turkey arrests dozens in nationwide raids on LGBTQ+ bars and activist groups
TheColu.mn: Turkey — Rising Prosecutions Against LGBTQ+ People
RSF Director-General Thibaut Bruttin interview on Turkey press freedom index