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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[Erdogan] has called Hizmet a state within a state, which to me is a strange characterization. To me, that’s like saying that the Catholics are a state within a state in America, or the Jews, a state within a state in America. Those kinds of statements are derogatory, they’re pejoratives. Catholics have a right to seek influence in America; Jews have a right to seek influence in America, that’s how we operate here.
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Erdogan contends the failed takeover was inspired by cleric Fethullah Gulen, now in voluntary exile in the U.S. Erdogan is systematically trying to eliminate Gulen’s followers and has asked the U.S. to extradite him. Gulen has emphatically denied any involvement in the coup attempt and has suggested that it was staged as an excuse for Erdogan to stop dissenters. Gulen’s history suggests he is more humanitarian than militant.
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