Date posted: April 2, 2017
A report published by The Black Sea news website on Saturday revealed that imams from Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) spied on people sympathetic to Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and the movement he inspired in Romania as well.
According to the report, following a July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, a memo from Turkey’s counselor for religious affairs in Bucharest, Osman Kilic, was sent to the Diyanet in Ankara on Sept. 27, 2016.
This document includes a list of 11 schools, kindergartens and one university that are part of the Lumina Educational Institutions, which have been active in Romania since 1994.
“The Turkish Embassy in Bucharest has told us it ‘does not have any information’ about this correspondence. But documents from the same cache, seen by the European Investigative Collaborations Network, have been confirmed by other Turkish diplomatic missions,” said the report.
“There are tough allegations that the Turkish Embassy is blocking the release of vital documents to Turkish citizens and cancelling their passports — forcing them to stay in Romania, and ‘blackmailing’ parents into pulling their children from Gulenist schools,” added the report.
Turkey’s worldwide monitoring
A report published by German Der Spiegel magazine on Friday revealed details of Turkey’s spying activities on people linked with the Gülen movement around the world.
Evaluating diplomatic cables containing information collected by Turkish diplomatic missions in 35 countries, Der Spiegel wrote: “Turkish embassies in Nigeria, Australia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia have all reported on the schools in those countries they believe to be affiliated with the Gülen movement. They document the organizations in which Gülen supporters are active and the media they write for. They also outline the relationships of the alleged supporters to each country’s government.”
Source: Turkish Minute , April 2, 2017
Tags: Europe | Persecution of Hizmet by Erdogan | Romania | Turkey |

İPEK ÜZÜM A grand inauguration ceremony was held at 19 Mayıs Stadium in Ankara on Saturday night for the 11th International Turkish Language Olympiad, a festival that celebrates the Turkish language and this year brought together 2,000 students from 140 countries around the world. The 11th Olympiad, which is organized by the International Turkish Education […]

Workers from the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality have demolished a small, prefabricated shelter on land that belongs to the Hizmet-affiliated Mehtap Education Foundation, despite the lack of official permission to carry out the demolition.

Thousands of women, many with small children to take care of, were jailed in Turkey in an unprecedented crackdown and subjected to torture and ill-treatment in detention centers and prisons as part of the government’s systematic campaign of intimidation and persecution of critics and opponents.

Hizmet movement gets its strength from this independence. Because the movement gets money from no other sources than its own volunteers, it does not take orders. No doubt this is why certain people are made so uncomfortable right now by the Hizmet movement.

Even before the coup attempt in July, the judiciary was being essentially taken over by [then] PM Tayyip Erdogan. When the attempted coup occurred in July, within 24 hours there were arrest warrants for almost 3,000 judges. And it’s very clear, and in fact it’s been admitted by the deputy chair of the High Council [of Judges and Prosecutors, the body that selects and assigns judges], that that list of judges had existed for years.

For the first time in the 11-year reign of the AK Party, I was truly concerned when Erdoğan last week said that the decision to shut down private prep schools was finalized despite heavy resistance from a significant portion of society. A government that could consider interfering with “freedom of enterprise” is grim enough.
