Day: May 1, 2022

The diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) termed recent visits by Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the UAE and Saudi Arabia as a “positive step for the region.”

“President Erdogan’s visits to the UAE and brotherly Saudi Arabia, and adopting the approach of closer relations is a positive step for the entire region,” Anwar Gargash said on Twitter.

The senior Emirati official called for building confidence between countries of the region “to solve problems and to work together towards common stability and prosperity.”

On Saturday, President Erdogan concluded a two-day visit to Saudi Arabia at an invitation from Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

In February, Erdogan also visited the UAE for the first time in 10 years.

Source: Anadolu Agency

International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day or Labor Day, is being marked in Turkiye and across the world on Sunday.

The struggle for labor rights began when construction workers in Australia demanded a reduction in daily working hours.

On April 21, 1856, stone masons and construction workers in Melbourne left work, and marched from the University of Melbourne to the Parliament House to push for an 8-hour working day.

After Australia, workers in the US also called for fewer working hours. The movement picked pace and on May 1, 1886 thousands of workers staged a nationwide work stoppage, or mass strike, to adopt a standard 8-hour workday.

The Paris congress in 1889 declared May 1 as the day to take the 8-hour-day campaign worldwide, which is now a public holiday across the world.

During Ottoman rule, celebrations were held in 1911 in Thessaloniki by tobacco and cotton workers, while the first celebration in Istanbul was in 1912.

Turkiye’s first official May Day celebrations were held in 1923.

According to January 2022 statistics of the Turkish Ministry of Labor and Social Security, the rate of unionization among workers is 14.32%.

Source: Anadolu Agency

Police cracked down on protests by teachers across Iran on Sunday.

Teachers organized demonstrations in several cities on Labor Day to reiterate their demands for higher pay and better working conditions.

Clashes broke out after police used force against protesters in the provinces of Fars, Kermanshah, Kurdistan, Markazi, Ardabil, Isfahan and Bushehr.

There was no immediate confirmation of casualties or arrests, although videos circulating on social media showed several teachers being detained by security forces.

Educators in Iran went on a nationwide strike for several days last December, forcing the parliament to pass legislation to raise their salaries.

During Sunday’s demonstrations, protesters called on President Ebrahim Raisi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament, to ensure implementation of the law.

Other demands of the protesters include health insurance and retirement benefits, curbing privatization and maintaining free public education, recruitment of kindergarten teachers, and the release of jailed labor leaders and teachers.

Source: Anadolu Agency

The evacuation of civilians from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol has started and around 100 people are on their way to safety, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday.

The civilians are heading to “a controlled area,” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter.

“Tomorrow we’ll meet them in Zaporizhzhia,” he said, referring to the Ukrainian-controlled city that lies some 220 kilometers (130 miles) northwest of Mariupol.

“Grateful to our team! Now they, together with UN, are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant,” he added.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Defense Ministry said 80 civilians, including women and children, were evacuated from the Azovstal plant in Mariupol.

In a statement, the ministry said those who were evacuated to the settlement of Bezymennoe in Donetsk were provided with accommodation, food, and necessary medical assistance.

According to the ministry, those who wanted to go to areas controlled by Kyiv were handed over to representatives of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Later on Sunday, the ICRC said in a statement that its team “is currently participating in an operation to facilitate the safe passage of civilians out of the Azovstal plant and Mariupol towards Zaporizhzhia.”

“A convoy of buses and ambulances left on 29 April, travelled some 230 kilometers (143 miles) and reached the plant in Mariupol on Saturday morning, local time,” it added.

Several hundreds of civilians are believed to have been holed up in bunkers beneath the sprawling steel plant for weeks, along with the last remaining Ukrainian forces in the strategic port city.

After Antonio Guterres’ trip to Moscow this week, the UN said Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a UN-facilitated evacuation operation at the Azovstal plant.

Mariupol has been largely destroyed by Russian forces, who are pushing to form a land link between areas under Russian control in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.

At least 2,899 civilians have been killed and 3,235 others injured in Ukraine since the war with Russia began on Feb. 24, according to UN estimates. The true toll is feared to be much higher.

More than 5.4 million people have fled to other countries, with some 7.7 million people internally displaced, data from the UN refugee agency shows.

Source: Anadolu Agency