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.
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German intelligence expert and author Erich Schmidt-Eenboom has said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, not the faith-based Gülen movement, was behind a failed coup attempt in Turkey on July 15, 2016 based on intelligence reports from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).
Fethullah Gulen: I Condemn All Threats to Turkey’s Democracy
I have been advocating for democracy for decades. Having suffered through four military coups in four decades in Turkey — and having been subjected by those military regimes to harassment and wrongful imprisonment — I would never want my fellow citizens to endure such an ordeal again. If somebody who appears to be a Hizmet sympathizer has been involved in an attempted coup, he betrays my ideals.
Gülen: purge of public officials seems ‘arbitrary’
The Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who has inspired the popular civic and social Hizmet (Service) movement, has said that the reassignment of thousands of public officials from their posts without any disciplinary procedures following the Dec. 17, 2013 corruption scandal seems to have been conducted on an arbitrary basis.
Seyfullah Gülen, the brother of leading Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, died at the age of 72 on Friday morning at the private Şifa Hospital in Erzurum, where he had been receiving treatment after a heart attack.
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Turkish government anger with the Gulen movement, over its alleged involvement in the failed July 15 coup, has spread to Africa. Governments are being pressured into closing down Gulen schools. Children are romping around the school grounds apparently without a care in the world. A few of them are standing together and reciting in unison […]
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