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.
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.
Lawyers for Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen have said via Twitter that Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ should have provided proof to back up his statement that Gülen planned to return from the US to Turkey in a similar way to Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
NPR interviews Stephen Kinzer on graft probe and Fethullah Gulen
A corruption scandal has forced Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to reshuffle his cabinet, but he is rejecting calls for his resignation. Three of his ministers have resigned because of the scandal. The situation today is being called the biggest threat yet to Erdogan’s 11 years in office. Stephen Kinzer, visiting fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University, joins Here & Now’s Robin Young to discuss the unfolding situation in Turkey.
Erdoğan prepares for a bloodbath
Erdoğan’s ruling party has also begun issuing weapons permits to loyalists, especially through the Ottoman Youth Authority (Osmanli Ocaklari). I have previously reported Erdoğan’s appointment of former general Adnan Tanriverdi, the head of SADAT, to be his military counsel. Tanriverdi had been dismissed by the Turkish General Staff during the 1997 soft coup and appears bent on revenge against the secular order.
What Erdogan and Khomeini Have in Common
The Turkish secular elite who have long feared an Iranian-style theocracy in their own country may finally be seeing the worst of their fears come true. The widespread purges under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan following last month’s failed coup attempt against his government suggest the Turkish state is moving toward authoritarian Islamist rule of the sort that Iran introduced in 1979.
Int’l press organizations call for release of journalist Keneş, condemn arrest
New York-based press advocacy group the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Turkish authorities to immediately release Today’s Zaman Editor-in-Chief Bülent Keneş, condemning the arrest as a “relentless crackdown” on the press.
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