Date posted: August 6, 2016
Fethullah Gulen Talked to Kurdish TV NRT on Kurds, human rights and Erdogan.
Tags: Asia | Defamation of Hizmet | Fethullah Gulen | Interviews with Fethullah Gulen | Iraq | Kurdish Issue | Military coups in Turkey |

Low-flying military jets buzzed over Turkey’s capital of Ankara. Soldiers blocked major bridges in Istanbul. State-run television announced that the military had imposed martial law.

HRW report: “People continued to be arrested and remanded to pretrial custody on terrorism charges, with at least 50,000 remanded to pretrial detention and many more prosecuted since the failed coup. Those prosecuted include journalists, civil servants, teachers and politicians as well as police officers and military personnel. Most were accused of being followers of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen. Their charge often lacked compelling evidence of criminal activity.”

Amnesty South Asia Director Champa Patel: “With 24 million Pakistani children out of school, Pakistan’s decision to expel teachers from the Pak-Turk International Schools and Colleges will only hurt Pakistan’s children. What the country needs is more classrooms and more teachers, not a politically-motivated decision to purge educators at the behest of the Turkish government.”

Apparently, not every Justice and Development Party (AK Party) member and minister is on board with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hateful and insulting rhetoric against the Hizmet movement and Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and his followers.

Sending messages on New Year’s Eve on his Twitter account, Parliament’s Constitutional Commission head and AK Party deputy Burhan Kuzu claimed that “an intelligence report that was submitted to the prime minister detailed a parallel structure within state,” adding that some 2,000 people’s names are listed in that report.

On the other side, there is one very important thing that Indonesia must avoid. The Turkish government has been inching ever closer to becoming an Islamist nation, abandoning its secularity that has acted as the foundation of modern Turkey until now. The government’s power is also getting increasingly concentrated in the hands of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
