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 |

We are going through a very critical period. We need the common sense and support of all the precious members of the Hizmet movement as we have never needed them before. We must protect our democratic gains. I pen this article as a person who closely sided with the Hizmet movement during the attacks of Ergenekon — a clandestine organization nested within the state trying to overthrow or manipulate the democratically elected government — and the deep state, and who backed its justified objections to the government’s plan to shut down the prep schools.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday he told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu that it was irresponsible for his country to accuse the U.S. of involvement in Friday’s coup attempt.

NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, General Curtis Scaparrotti, said in December that he never had any reason to suspect that Turkish officers in his teams would be involved in a coup attempt. In their absence, and without their expertise, the capacity of his staff had been “degraded,” he told the Financial Times and Deutsche Welle.

Fethullah Gulen has been called Turkey’s second most powerful man. He is also a recluse, who lives in self-imposed exile in the US.

A Turkish professor who was my father’s colleague and frequently visited our house is now incapable of counting right amount of money to pay for a bottle of water at a prison canteen. He is traumatized as a result of days of harsh treatment during the interrogation. He is sharing a prison cell with my father, longtime friends, in western Turkey.

“Those who want to establish a parallel structure alongside the state, those who have infiltrated into the state institutions … We will come into your lairs, and we will lay out these organizations within the state,” PM Erdogan said on Dec. 21. Gulen responded in kind via a video message: “Those who don’t see the thief but go after those who chase the thief … May God bring fire to their homes.”
