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.
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More troubling is evidence emerging that his government is now using the attempted coup as a pretext to round up all manner of troublesome opponents, not just the Gulenists. It is also damaging the fabric of Turkish society and undermining its institutions, including the security forces. That is a dangerous move in a country whose immune system is already weakened by jihadism and which is battling armed opponents on several fronts.
Gülen underlines values, rejects alliance with political party or leader
In response to a question on whether “the alliance” between the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the Hizmet movement had ended, Gülen said, “If we can talk about an alliance, it was around [the] shared values of democracy, universal human rights and freedoms — never for political parties or candidates.”
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A speech by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who lives in Pennsylvania in self-imposed exile, was broadcast live on YouTube and a number of stations for the first time on Sunday, after Turkey’s state-controlled Internet watchdog blocked access to herkul.org, a website that previously was used to broadcast his speeches.
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Republican People’s Party (CHP) head Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has called on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to explain why he signed a National Security Council (MGK) decision in 2004 recommending an action plan against the Gülen movement. “The fact that Erdoğan has [avoided] speaking on such an important matter proves his culpability,” Kılıçdaroğlu argued, accusing the government of hypocrisy.
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Last Wednesday, my Twitter followers attracted my attention to a “news piece.” The “news” was in Aksam daily, one of the semi-official newspapers of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). When I looked at it, I immediately saw my name and other words, such as “Zirve murder,” “parallel structure” and so on in its headline at the top of the paper.
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