The headline of this column belongs to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He said it during his party’s parliamentary group meeting on Tuesday.
The prime minister, who has directed harsh insults at the Hizmet movement and Fethullah Gülen in all the speeches he has made since the corruption investigation went public, continued to do so on Tuesday, too. He had previously called the Hizmet movement a “dirty organization,” “instrument of foreign powers,” “parallel organization” and “Hashishins.” On Tuesday, he defined the movement as the “last gang.” Saying that his government has fought against gangs, military juntas and tutelage as well as other deep powers, the prime minister added, “There will not be any obstacle in the way of democracy when this last gang becomes a thing of the past.” He also said his government managed to stop the “Dec. 17 coup attempt.” In addition, he accused Hizmet of spying and added, “The responsible figures and evidence [of a coup attempt] will soon be exposed.” The prime minister has put forward many claims since Dec. 17, but he has not provided any satisfactory evidence to back up these claims. I wonder how he will prove his allegations of spying.
A Turkish family of four has settled in New Hampshire, fleeing a crackdown in their homeland that has led to the arrests of thousands of civil servants. They can’t go home but they can’t stay here forever; the tourist visas that brought them here will expire. So they wait, and they worry.
AK Party’s social media instructions to ministries raise questions of legality
The Taraf daily reported on the written instructions sent in an email to social media coordinators at government ministries by the AK Party’s media coordinator, Burak Gültekin. The email read as follows: “Dear ministry social media coordinator, Attached please see a note on prep schools…” The attachment included templates for tweets some of which include content teasing the Hizmet movement and the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.
Illegal raid against Bank Asya spells disaster for Turkey, says TUSKON head
“The raid on Bank Asya is a violation of the right of proprietorship and a murders the entrepreneurial spirit,” noted the president of the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists of Turkey (TUSKON), Rızanur Meral, in an interview with Bugün TV.
Pro-gov’t columnist still threatening fellow journalists
A columnist for the pro-government daily Yeni Şafak, Cem Küçük, continues to target journalists critical of the government for regular intimidation in his column.On Jan. 16, Küçük argued that an operation will be staged against newspapers with ties to the Hizmet movement and that the journalists who work in those newspapers would be brought to trial. He also said that the Journalists and Writers Foundation (GYV) would be tried over its press releases.
UN and OSCE experts deplore crackdown on journalists and media outlets in Turkey
UN / OSCE: The Government’s purging of personnel and institutions of what it perceives as being dissenting and critical voices, solely on the basis of allegations of membership in the Gülen movement, clearly violates standards of international human rights law.
KCK, Gülen, AKP: shifting alliances?
MUSTAFA GÜRBÜZ Regarding the heated prep school debate, Justice and Development Party (AKP) Ardahan Deputy Orhan Atalay explicitly spelled out the AKP- Gülen tension: “Just as the KCK [the Kurdistan Communities Union, an umbrella organization that contains the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)] is a parallel structure within the state; prep schools have become the same […]
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