Human Rights Watch Director: This is a political purge… pure and simple!
Date posted: January 31, 2017
HizmetNews.Com
Reuters reports that Turkish authorities have dismissed more than 90,000 public servants for alleged connections to a coup attempt in July 2016. Labour Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu said 125,485 people from the public service had been put through legal proceedings after the coup attempt, and that 94,867 of those had been dismissed so far.
Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch Director, has denounced the purge saying “No one pretends there were 90,000 coup plotters. This is a political purge, pure and simple. Erdogan’s Turkey”
No one pretends there were 90,000 coup plotters. This is a political purge, pure and simple. Erdogan’s Turkey. https://t.co/VBH6qIxYDU
As Reuters reports [Erdogan’s] Turkey has been rooting out followers of the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen. Erdogan accuses the Gulen’s Hizmet movement of having infiltrated state institutions and plotted to overthrow the government. Gulen has unequivocally denied the allegations and condemned the coup immediately before it was repelled.
It seems that the judiciary will be forced to investigate the claims of a so-called illegal organization, and sham trials will be performed to intimidate the Hizmet movement and cover up the corruption claims that become public on Dec. 17, 2013, by taking tactics from the former Ergenekon supporters nested within the army, the bureaucracy, business circles, the media and the judiciary.
Turks Should Question The Official Narrative That Gulen Was Behind The Coup
I am not trying to absolve one side or the other. The coup attempt was a heinous assault on Turkey’s civilian politics and the plotters must be punished in a fashion that deters similar actions in the future. What I am trying to understand is why everyone agrees that Gulenists did it when there is little evidence and that is even questionable.
Istanbul court re-arrests former Zaman reporter minutes before leaving prison
Ayşenur Parıldak, a former reporter from the now-closed Zaman daily, was released early on Tuesday but was re-arrested by the same court hours before leaving prison upon a prosecutor objected to the initial ruling.
PM’s order echoes 2004 MGK decision [to undermine the Gulen Movement]
The prime minister’s order that Turkish ambassadors “tell the truth” to their foreign interlocutors about the corruption probe has brought to mind a controversial National Security Council (MGK) document indicating that Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) agreed to a planned crackdown on the Hizmet movement led by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen in 2004.
What does Turkey deserve?
Once the remaining human capital exits Turkey, the country will be left to bigoted seculars and even more bigoted political Islamists. Given the shameful silence and support for the worst witch-hunt the country has ever witnessed, maybe this is what Turkey deserves: swaying between secular authoritarianism and popular Islamist dictatorship.
Gulen Movement, civilian governments and the AK Party
The Gulen movement’s understanding of politics and the political process differentiate it from the military and bureaucratic elite. Its main political objective is to transform society by raising the moral consciousness of individuals. By raising moral consciousness, the movement hopes to cleanse the bureaucracy of widespread corruption, increase the efficiency and transparency of state institutions, reinvigorate public work ethic to serve the people in order to enhance the legitimacy of the state, and create opportunity spaces for marginalized sectors of the Anatolian population.
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