When asked about the issue of Erdoğan’s survival, [CHP Istanbul deputy] Erdoğdu said: “The upcoming presidential election [which is scheduled for Aug. 10] is not the main part of this struggle. He might be elected president and elude the graft investigation. What about his son Bilal and other family members? How can they escape an investigation? The main battle is between Erdoğan and the Hizmet movement. That is why Erdoğan talks about eliminating the movement. He considers the matter a fight for survival.”
When the graft allegations first surfaced on Dec. 17 of last year, the government and its media did everything to undermine the reputation of the Hizmet movement. Even AK Party deputies who resigned because of increasingly anti-democratic practices became targets. The government’s ambition to finish off the Hizmet movement is still continuing, and Erdoğan has pledged to eliminate the movement.
Excerpted from the interview published on Today’s Zaman, 26 July 2014, Saturday
US law professor has no doubt Gulen trial in Turkey was political
05 February 2012, Sunday / AKIN KARAGÜLLE, İSTANBUL James C. Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project and a law professor at the University of Texas, wrote a book titled “Wrestling with Free Speech, Religious Freedom, and Democracy in Turkey: The Political Trials and Times of Fethullah Gülen” on the trial of renowned Islamic […]
Conceptual contradictions when it comes to rhetoric about ‘parallel state’
.In the wake of the Dec. 17 corruption operations that took place in Turkey, the government removed and changed such an extraordinarily high number of people from their positions in the police force, the justice system and the national education structure that these changes certainly would not have been possible in a state of law. An attempt was made to see these changes happen within the framework of heavy propaganda about the concept of the existence of a “parallel state.”
Liberal Turkish Journalists Champion Freedom of Expression, to a Degree
It’s precisely opposition journalists who have been criticized by colleagues who until recently worked for the newspapers of U.S.-based Fethullah Gulen. These colleagues accuse the opposition journalists of betraying freedom of expression. One of them is Sevgi Akarcesme who was editor-in-chief of the Turkish English-language daily Today’s Zaman. There is a great deal of truth in Akarcesme’s claims. But who today would dare defend journalists identified with Gulen?
Purge of ‘parallel state’ or legitimizing discrimination
The profiling of religious Muslim students who are part of the Hizmet movement caused them to be barred from obtaining high positions such as being academics at state institutions, according to Aymaz.
Erdogan men advised to have polygamous marriages with wives of jailed Gülen followers
Foreign Economic Relations Board of Turkey (DEİK) representative in the Austrian province of Vorarlberg Hasan Güray Özüyer has said in his twitter message, “Let [the AKP male] supporters enter into [polygamous] marriages with four wives of jailed followers of Fethullah Gülen.”
Erdogan’s endless legitimacy crisis
Erdogan, who is avoiding dealing with the corruption charges, cannot preserve his government on the dead-end street he has entered.
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