
Scholars at Risk (SAR) is gravely concerned about sweeping actions against Turkey’s higher education sector, including most recently prolonged incommunicado detention and related risks of torture and ill-treatment of hundreds of higher education professionals, in violation of Turkey’s obligations under domestic and international law.

It is vital for Washington and Turkey’s other international partners now to use all their influence to press Ankara to reverse course, to safeguards the rights of those caught up in the purge, and to strengthen rather than weaken the independence of the institutions that underpin it, including the courts, media, universities and parliament itself. The people who died defending it deserve nothing less.

In my research, I have been on the inside living with his followers while teaching English at one of the schools. Religion is not taught. It is not in the curriculum. The idea that these are jihadist madrases, or that Gülenists are extremists or terrorists is beyond absurd as anyone who knows them will attest.

Erdogan’s counter-coup may do more to change Turkish politics than the coup plotters ever sought, completing the country’s transformation from secular democracy to what’s fast becoming the new favorite government for aspiring dictators — one where the media is strictly controlled, conformity is entrenched through the schools, elections bring little change, and presidents can rule for life.

If someone wants to help Kyrgyzstan, this help should be unconditional, the President of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev said. “If you set some conditions; then, please, do not help us at all. We are not dictated anything… Do not tell us what we should do. We do not need such aid; then, take it away,” the president added.

Erdoğan is a dictator, but he might not have achieved his ambition absent Western naïveté. He and his supporters played American and European officials like a fiddle. He sought to disempower the Turkish military but couched his ambition to do so in the rhetoric of democratic reform.

Critics claim that this failed coup attempt was simply a pretext to legitimize arbitrary authoritarian practices, eliminate all the dissent while filling the state apparatus with staunch supporters, and start an ethnic cleansing against sympathizers of the Gulen movement and Alawites.

Jason Hanna and Tim Hume Captured military officers raped by police, hundreds of soldiers beaten, some detainees denied food and water and access to lawyers for days. These are the grim conditions that many of the thousands who were arrested in Turkey face in the aftermath of a recent failed coup, witnesses tell Amnesty International. […]

For an economy almost in recession, these kind of controversies could be worrisome. This is actually not the time to close down any legitimate business in Nigeria. Turkish schools and their promoters have not really given the Nigerian government any reason to worry. They have been law abiding citizens in Nigeria.

But nothing in those proposed laws came close to undercutting Turkey’s justice system like the judicial purge does. If they want to be consistent, European leaders should insist on the reinstatement of the fired judges, or at least case-by-case adjudication of their alleged wrongdoing. The U.S. should make similar demands on its NATO ally. The future of the rule of law in Turkey lies in the balance.

‘Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force,” Gulen said. “I pray to God for Turkey, for Turkish citizens, and for all those currently in Turkey that this situation is resolved peacefully and quickly.’ Gulen sharply rejected any responsibility: ‘As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt.

While on its face, the notion that elements in the Turkish military loyal to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan deliberately launched a “fake coup” to justify a crackdown on Erdoğan’s enemies sounds farfetched, the belief is taking hold not only among Turkey’s staunch secularist minority and followers of Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, but also among those who know the Turkish military well.

The KRG Ministry of Education said it would abide by any decision made by the KRG Council of Ministers concerning the closure of the organization’s schools in the Kurdistan Region. Sherko Hama Amin, a member of the Kurdistan Parliament’s Education Committee, told NRT that schools should not be shut down over political reasons, especially a political issue outside the region.