NATO's push for higher defense budgets decried

ISTANBUL — As Turkiye prepares to host the NATO summit on Tuesday and Wednesday, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir over the weekend to denounce the alliance's push for higher defense spending.

Demonstrators carried banners reading "NATO wants war, workers want peace", "Budget for the people, not for NATO", and "No to NATO, no to war", while chanting slogans against the alliance.

In Istanbul, workers, civilians and members of political parties joined large rallies across the city, voicing their opposition to NATO's pressure on member states to increase military expenditures.

During a demonstration organized by the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkiye, Chair Arzu Cerkezoglu said expanding war budgets threatens social security and places a heavier economic burden on ordinary people.

"We want more jobs, not more weapons. We want more schools, not more missiles. We want more hospitals, not more military spending," Cerkezoglu said.

Demonstrators at a rally led by the Communist Party of Turkiye used funeral imagery to call for NATO's dissolution.

"Under the pretext of strengthening defense against an imagined enemy, more money is allocated to the arms industry, tax policies are adjusted accordingly, and, in the end, people are impoverished so that other nations can be bombed," Cem Demirok, a party member, told Xinhua News Agency.

The protests come as the Ankara summit is expected to discuss the pathways to deliver the commitment agreed by NATO member states at the 2025 summit to raise their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035, a long-standing demand from Washington.

More than 100 detained

On Sunday, police detained more than 100 people during an anti-NATO protest in Ankara, according to the Cumhuriyet daily, as authorities imposed a ban on demonstrations in the capital ahead of the summit.

Baris Doster, a scholar at the Marmara University in Istanbul, said the protests reflect public anxiety over the domestic costs of rising militarization.

"NATO is not an ordinary, simple defense and security organization," Doster said. "It is an organization with economic, political and ideological preferences. It is the gendarme of capitalism, imperialism and liberalism under US leadership."

Raising the spending target to 5 percent by pushing allies to purchase more weapons, ammunition and military equipment would primarily benefit the US defense industry at the expense of their own domestic economies, he said.

XINHUA