The United Nations expressed grave concern on Saturday over the deportation by Myanmar and Thailand of a Turkish national over alleged connections to a July 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Muhammet is at least the sixth person to be deported from Southeast Asia over alleged connections to Gulen’s movement, the UN said.
Myanmar-based education professional M. Furkan Sökmen and his family were detained yesterday at the Yangon International Airport while trying to board a flight to Bangkok. the teacher said the Turkish ambassador to Myanmar had pressured police to confiscate the family’s passports.
The xenophobic feelings towards minorities, vulnerable groups, opposition figures and foreigners in today’s Turkey are being charged by country’s authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who spews hate speech effectively every day, giving rise to discrimination and stigmatization of millions of people in Turkey and around the world.
Seventeen housewives were arrested by a Turkish court on Tuesday due to alleged use of a smart phone application called ByLock and links to the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government blames for a failed coup last July, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Oklahoma City Thunder center Enes Kanter expressed his desire to become a US citizen and underscored a previous claim that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the “Hitler of our century” on Monday in New York in his first comments since his detainment at a Romanian airport over the weekend.
Appearing on “CBS This Morning” Monday, Kanter said the trouble began while he was in Indonesia: “I was sleeping around 2:30 or something and my manager knocked on my door. He said the Secret Service and the Indonesian army were looking for me because the Turkish government told them I was a dangerous man.
Under arrest along with his mother since April 27, three-month-old Betul A. has been suffering from oral thrush in prison, her grandfather told Turkish media. With her father, Ali İhsan also under arrest over similar charges, Betul is kept under mother’s care in prison.
“Tainted as ‘terrorists’ and stripped of their livelihoods, a large swathe of people in Turkey are no longer able to continue in their careers and have had alternative employment opportunities blocked,” Andrew Gardner, Amnesty International’s researcher on Turkey.
South Africans know what it means to be detained without trial and tortured. With that history in mind, the ANC-led government is not about to extradite a list of Turkish expats working in South Africa to Turkey, where their detention and torture is likely.
An Ankara court sent to jail 4 out of 16 Turkish nationals who were deported back to home from Saudi Arabia as part of Turkey’s ever-growing crackdown against the Gülen movement that that has spread to overseas in the recent past.
A mother of three in the western province of Izmir, Fadime Danışman was arrested along with her 8-month-old baby after police failed to locate her husband, a teacher by profession, as part of an investigation into the Gülen movement.