Turkey Continues Its Witch Hunt Against Gülen Followers
Photos of the individuals arrested and detained. Source: Turkish Minute.
Date posted: September 3, 2016
MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN
The purges continue unabated in Turkey. On Friday, 218 individuals were arrested on charges of being members of a terrorist organization. Another 421 were detained.
These arrests and detentions took place more than 6 weeks after the Turkish military staged a failed coup. In the meantime, not only the military officers responsible for the coup have been arrested, but the same goes for many others: people who had absolutely nothing to do with the coup, but who are simply accused of sympathizing with Fethullah Gülen, the Islamic scholar Turkey says masterminded the coup.
In what’s becoming a repetitive story, a host of journalists, lawyers, teachers and civil servants were among those arrested by the authorities.
All in all, more than 41,000 people have been detained in recent weeks, and more than 22,000 individuals were arrested. According to the latest reports, a sum total of 130,000 people have lost their jobs.
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.
Turks in South Africa tell a different narrative about Erdogan
The Hizmet Movement, founded by exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, hosted a panel discussion by its South African branch last weekend. The purpose of the event was to clarify misconceptions about the movement and its involvement in the current political situation in Turkey.
Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen has always supported the settlement process aimed at ending decades of conflict in Turkey, his lawyer said on Sunday. “Gülen has always made positive statements about the [settlement] process,” Nurullah Albayrak, Gülen’s lawyer, said. Albayrak’s remarks were aimed at dismissing claims that Gülen was “sabotaging” the settlement process and supported […]
Turkey’s ‘black box’ must be opened
The recent debate on tutoring centers and private prep schools and the shocking revelations on the dirty warfare used in the 1990s against the Kurdish population are certainly parts of this pressure-cooker-like mood. It is obvious that “Erdoğan’s Way” of running the country is based on keeping tension just under control, so that it will serve his own ambitions to cement personal power.
Gülen-linked gold firm’s operations halted for second time in two months
Gold firm Koza Altın’s operations at a mine in the Central Anatolian province of Eskişehir have been suspended by the governorship, two months after the halting of another mine belonging to company known to have close ties with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.
Politically motivated police raid of kindergarten in west Turkey
The witch hunt against the opponents of the government continues and is growing. In another instance of a government-orchestrated operation targeting the faith-based Gülen movement, popularly known as the Hizmet movement, the police along with inspectors conducted raids around 6 am on Tuesday at dozens of institutions owned by the Yamanlar Educational Institutions, which was established by volunteers of the movement in the western province of İzmir.
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