Nine-year-old Nurefşan Teke drowned on Thursday while trying to cross the Evros River with her mother Neslihan in order to reunite with her father, who had to flee Turkey five years ago due to an ongoing government crackdown on alleged members of the Gülen movement.
The seventh stage [of genicide] is “Preparation.” Erdogan and his supporters direct violent phrases at Hizmet participants, including “they will not have access to food and water” and “they will beg us to kill them to avoid torture.” Widespread propaganda calls Hizmet participants “assassins,” “terrorists” or pawns of foreign powers such as the CIA, Mossad or the Vatican.
“The increasingly widespread witch-hunt, systematic and widespread hate speech, ongoing persecution and massacre of Gulen movement members have made conditions in Turkey ripe for a deliberate, planned and systematic genocide,” Bülent Keneş, a veteran Turkish journalist in exile, wrote in his newly released book.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg sent an official request to Albania asking it not to deport a Turkish citizen who is known to be a follower of the Gülen movement to Turkey as his trial has not been concluded in Albania, the Tirana Times reported.
A woman was detained less than 24 hours after delivering a baby yesterday for alleged affiliation with the Gülen movement, a faith-based group inspired by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen. Betül Uluçam, 34, was detained in the hospital where she had given birth less than a day before.
Several schools formerly run by the Gülen movement in Albania have been the subject of growing government pressure in recent weeks. On Oct. 28 the campus of the Turgut Özal School was raided by Albanian police without any court order or warrant, and excessive force was used in the presence of students.
The UN group called on Ankara to release the six individuals immediately, and the Turkish and Kosovar governments to accord the victims an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations, in accordance with international law.
The pictures showing the grim death of a police officer sacked with an emergency decree have sparked debate on the conditions in Turkish prisons amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Pictures from his prison cell showed his dead body on a plastic chair in filthy surroundings, prompting deputies to question prison conditions.
The purge of the Hizmet Movement is what the Kurdish question was to Kemalism, a necessary tool with which to construct a new national identity, a tool to silence those who question it, and to design a social and political system that will foster it. Unfortunately, Turkey has no chance of going back, even to its fragile and dysfunctional democracy, without this narrative being completely rejected.
Turkey is where it is today, not because of Gulen and the Hizmet Movement but rather as the product of a change of heart in the current government leadership, flushing good governance and tolerance components from the country’s management affairs running systems. Solution to the Ankara crisis can only be found through establishing its root cause rather than finding a scapegoat.