Turkish riot police used tear gas grenades and water cannon on Saturday to disperse more than 2,000 people demonstrating against new internet curbs that have sparked alarm in the country and abroad.



Large numbers of police with body armour and shields backed up by armoured water cannon trucks deployed against the chanting, mostly young crowd around Istanbul’s emblematic Taksim Square.

“I pay my own internet bill but it’s the government that decides what sites I can look at,” said one demonstrator, Semih.

“They want to control what we do on the internet. It’s repression. But the young will not be repressed. We won’t take it lying down.”

Protesters threw stones at police, smashed windows — including at a US fast-food outlet — and sprayed anarchy signs on banks. They were pursued by police down side streets off the central Istiklal boulevard.

Earlier in the day the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, vehemently rejected criticism of the new curbs, passed on Wednesday by parliament, to a crowd of several thousand supporters in Istanbul.

“These regulations do not impose any censorship at all on the internet ... On the contrary they make it safer and freer.”

He denied that authorities would have access to internet users’ personal information: “Never. It is out of the question that people’s private data will be recorded.”

Critics have said the new curbs are an attempt by Erdogan to stifle dissent and stop evidence being seen online of high-level corruption.

They give the telecoms authority the power to order a webpage blocked without a court order if the content is deemed to infringe privacy or is offensive.

The timing has raised eyebrows because it comes as Erdogan deals with a graft scandal that erupted in December and implicates his inner circle. Erdogan has portrayed the investigation as a plot against him by people within the Turkish police and judiciary loyal to Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher living in the United States.

Human Rights Watch said the restrictions raised concerns that a “defensive government is seeking to increase its power to silence critics and to arbitrarily limit politically damaging material online”.

The European parliament’s president, Martin Schulz, has called the laws a “step back in an already suffocating environment for media freedom”. Washington has also expressed misgivings.

Erdogan’s government has sacked or moved to different jobs thousands of police and prosecutors ahead of important local elections on 30 March that could determine whether he runs for president in August.

Burak, a young demonstrator in Istanbul, said: “One of the few remaining liberties we have is the internet and being able to communicate. This is what they want to constrain … they are really scared of social networks and the internet.”

Erdogan, 59, who has been in power since 2003, is also seeking to push through legislation reforming the judiciary, which critics will say will increase government control. There also are worries for the freedom of the press.

On Friday an Azeri journalist and blogger was deported from Turkey because of tweets criticising the government, according to his newspaper, Zaman, which is close to Gulen. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said Mahir Zeynalov’s ejection “is a further setback for the dire state of media freedom in Turkey’’.

The US-based rights group Freedom House said that over the past year in Turkey “dozens of journalists have been fired because of government pressure, and government officials’ threats against journalists have become common”.