ANKARA: Dozens of demonstrators were arrested on Saturday in the Turkish capital Ankara as police used pepper spray and water cannon to disperse a protest in favor of secular education.

Police moved in on the protest, organized by labor unions, in the Kizilay district of Ankara with protesters forced to take cover from the jets of water and pepper spray, an AFP photographer reported.

Some reports said as many as 100 people may have been arrested, including the head of the Egitim-Is education union Veli Demir.

Many activists have been angered by the interventions of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the Turkish education system which they allege have undermined the country’s secularity.

The government lifted a ban on female students wearing the Islamic headscarf in high schools and has encouraged the opening of Imam Hatip schools which mix religious education with a modern curriculum.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday praised as “clean and lawful” the legal process against his opponents that has been sharply criticised by the EU and includes an arrest warrant for his arch-foe Fethullah Gulen.

“I have been watching this process closely as president of this country. Everything is lawful and in line with procedure ... a really diligent and clean process is going on at the moment,” Erdogan said in a televised speech in Istanbul.

“The police and judiciary are not repeating the mistakes of the past,” he added.

Erdogan defended the detention of journalists as part of the probe, saying that some journalists were using the profession as a “mask” for other activities.

He argued that the detention of journalists was nothing unusual, referring to the arrests in Britain over the phone-tapping scandal that rocked the tabloid press there.

His comments came a day after an Istanbul court issued an arrest warrant for the US-based Gulen, who Erdogan accuses of running a “parallel state” from his exile in the US state of Pennsylvania.