Faces of Manisa prisoners rendered unrecognizable due to torture, lawyer says
Date posted: October 8, 2016
The faces of people held in a Manisa prison have become unrecognizable due to heavy torture, Seda Tanrıkulu, a lawyer representing some of the prisoners, told the Turkish media.
“When I met with prisoners, there were bruises on the face of D.K., made by the boots of officials,” Tanrıkulu said.
Stating that prison guards reportedly banged the heads of prisoners on the wall with their hands cuffed behind their backs, she added, “The face of O.K. was unrecognizable due scars made by nightsticks.”
“Political [prisoners] are being subjected to torture,” said a man under arrest, in an obvious cry for help, as he was being forced into a police car after a medical checkup in Manisa province, earlier this week.
Apart from those already under arrest, Turkey has detained 51,000 people and arrested 27,000 others over alleged links to the Gülen movement, which the government accuses of masterminding a July 15 coup attempt, over the past two-and-a-half-months.
Last week’s military coup attempt in Turkey is likely to have a debilitating impact on Turkish democracy. Already, several thousand military officials and bureaucrats have been arrested. Even more perturbing, more than 2,000 judges were removed from their jobs.
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They were happy when Greek police caught them. “They treated us very well,” Hakan says. “Zehra told us she felt safer spending [several nights] in jail than [she did] in Turkey. She said: ‘The Greek police are keeping us safe from the Turks.'”
Erdoğan now at odds with once-closest ally
Those who have an interest in Turkish politics may have been a little confused for the last few weeks, observing the row between Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) government and the social movement of religious scholar Fethullah Gülen, or the “Hizmet” (Service) movement as they preferred to be called. The row is over the closure of private prep schools (“dershane” in Turkish).
Terrorist organization seeks to fill void in Southeast after closure of prep schools
Terrorist organizations are getting ready to fill the void in the education system in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated Southeast following the government’s decision to shut down prep schools and study centers, the Bugün daily said on Monday. “The [terrorist Kurdistan Workers Party] PKK is increasing the number of Education Support Houses [EDEV] in the eastern and southeastern […]
Gülen has strongly rejected comparison to Iran’s Khomeini time and again
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ’s recently rehashed allegations that Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen planned to return from the US to Turkey in a way similar to Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini are decades-old discredited claims that have been refuted time and again by Gülen himself in his published statements.
Erdogan and Gulen: Inevitable Clash?
Unlike Turkey’s classical Islamic activists, Gulen always distanced himself from politics, and like Said Nursi, his main source of inspiration, his message was focused on grassroots social activism, most importantly an education combining both Islam and modern science. Hizmet’s main goal was social: raising a new “golden” generation fusing moderate Muslim and Modern ethics to become the backbone of Turkey’s society and bureaucracy and its messengers to the world.
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