Turkey purged its police on Monday after rounding up thousands of soldiers in the wake of a failed military coup, and said it could reconsider its friendship with the United States unless Washington hands over a cleric Ankara blames for the putsch. “If Turkey decides to submit an extradition request for anyone legally resident in the United States, it will be considered under the terms of the U.S. -Turkey extradition agreement”. The government has blamed Friday’s failed coup – which it says killed 208 government supporters and 24 plotters – on backers of a USA -based Muslim cleric who has become President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief opponent.
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The swift response, including calls to reinstate the death penalty for plotters, drew concern from Western allies who said Ankara must uphold the rule of law in the country, a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member that is Washington’s most powerful Muslim ally.
Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency said earlier on Monday that Ozturk had confessed to helping to plot the coup.
“A more volatile and depreciating currency accompanied by concerns about more terrorist attacks may lead to a weaker economic activity as households shift to a saving mode and corporates postpone strategic investment decisions”, said Piotr Matys, an analyst at Rabobank.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says his country has documents detailing the responsible parties of the failed coup attempt that tried to topple the government over the weekend. He said at the US would first need to see “evidence, not allegations” of Gulen’s responsibility.
Tension in Turkey is still high following the failed coup.
Turkey’s attempts to join the 28-nation European Union have been hobbled in recent years by concern over the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan’s record on human rights and press freedom.
“Today, we will say together with the ministers that this obviously doesn’t mean that the rule of law and the system of checks and balances does not count”.
A spokesman for the German government said that the re-introduction of the death penalty would mean the end to Turkey’s European Union accession negotiations.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said that “the rule of law must prevail”.
“We can not delay this anymore because in this country, those who launch a coup will have to pay the price for it”, he said in a funeral service for those death during the uprising.
Yildirim said that the imposition of the death penalty requires a change of the Turkish constitution.
While Erdogan is democratically elected and most Turks prefer him to military rule, he has also placed his supporters into key positions of power while ridding himself of “any form of opposition”, Haykel said.
Mostafa Minawi, director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Initiative at Cornell University, called the failed coup “a gift for President Erdogan, given him all the justification he needs to implement further clamp down measures against any dissenters, in the process sinking Turkey deeper into authoritarianism”.
“In our assessment, this group acted out of a sense of emergency when they realised that they were under investigation. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage”, Hahn said.
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“The full circumstances of the coup attempt and the violence that followed it must be effectively investigated and all those responsible brought to justice in fair trials”, the statement read.
