President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to rule out bringing back the death penalty, telling broadcaster CNN in an interview via a government translator, “There is a clear crime of treason”.
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He is, by all accounts, ruthless in his quest to consolidate power. “It would even be a hostile act against Turkey”.
After dominating Turkish politics for more than 10 years, Erdogan ran up against term limits.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says Turkey’s state of emergency should only last as long as it’s “absolutely necessary”.
Since then, he’s grown increasingly paranoid, steering Turkey away from secularism and identifying new enemies to purge with regularity. He’s waged a well-publicized war against the press – journalists in Turkey have “faced growing violence, harassment, and intimidation from both state and nonstate actors during the year”, according to Freedom House’s 2016 freedom of the press analysis.
While he recognized the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Kerry said: “We caution against a reach that goes beyond that”.
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.
Warplanes patrolled Turkey’s skies days after a failed coup, officials said Monday, in a sign that authorities feared that the threat against the government was not yet over.
Turkey says Gulen masterminded the coup attempt.
The Turkish incident in the context of overall USA foreign policy is made more complicated by the fact that America, in spite of its professions of attachment to law, order and democracy, nonetheless looked the other way when Egyptian Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi carried out his coup d’etat against Egypt’s elected president in 2013, even maintaining arms sales, and retains close ties to the numerous monarchies of the region. “We will present them with more evidence than they want”, Binali Yildirim told parliament. “Turkey is an ally”. The U.S. was using backup generators.
Two members of Turkey’s constitutional court were formally arrested on Wednesday along with 111 other officials from the judiciary, including 111 other judges, prosecutors and high court members as the number of those involved in the failed Gülenist coup grow each day, Daily Sabah writes.
Turkey’s president on Wednesday declared a three-month state of emergency following a botched coup attempt, declaring he would rid the military of the “virus” of subversion and giving the government sweeping powers to expand a crackdown that has already included mass arrests and the closure of hundreds of schools.
Some of the USA aircraft carrying out bombing raids in Iraq and Syria are based in Turkey.
And if Gulen, who is reportedly closely watched by American intelligence services, had orchestrated the coup attempt, the USA would know it, Middle East energy and geopolitics expert Justin Dargin told RT.
To add another tricky piece to the puzzle, the man whose movement Mr. Erdogan has labeled as responsible for the coup attempt, Fethullah Gulen, a Sufi Muslim cleric, exiled himself in 1999 to the United States and lives in northeastern Pennsylvania. “The U.S.government would be quite aware if something of this nature were to transpire in the U.S”.
The Turkish government claimed the failed coup was organized by Gulen’s followers and has sent official request to the US government for his extradition.
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Erdogan was in the Aegean resort of Marmaris when the coup struck.
