“It’s important for everybody to understand, including the president of Turkey, that the coup was repelled because of the country’s commitment to democracy”, Earnest said.
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“I am requesting my heroic nation, which thwarted the armed coup attempt with its foresight and courage, to continue the democracy watch on the streets until our country gets out of this hard situation for good”, Erdogan said at a news conference held at the Presidential Complex. The vote grants sweeping new powers to President Erdogan, who had already centralized an unprecedented level of power before the failed coup. The government has made a decision to declare three months of state of emergency on Wednesday, which the parliament has approved Thursday.
The paradox is that no other leader in the Middle East is more demonised than Erdogan when he is one of the very few heads of state who have actually been democratically elected in that part of the world “we” wish to keep as a “black hole” and “our” antithesis.
The Turkish government claimed the failed coup was organized by followers of Fethullah Gulen, a USA -based cleric.
“This is a state of emergency imposed not on the people, but on (the state) itself”, declared Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Turkey’s various security forces will be thoroughly investigated.
In the wake of a massive crackdown on the opposition across all sectors of society, which has so far affected over 60,000 people, Erdogan is pushing forward to reintroduce the death penalty, a move that has been criticized globally, and especially by the European Union, which Turkey has been trying to join.
“I hardly had contact with the prime minister”, Erdogan said as he was not able to reach the chiefs of intelligence agency and the general staff during the coup attempt.
Erdogan also announced that the day of the attempted overthrow, July 15, would forever be memorialized as the Day to Commemorate Martyrs. Asked if he had been afraid to take to the skies as the coup plot unfolded, he said he believed in destiny.
“The tarnished souls of the faithless were eaten up, finished and defeated before the souls of the faithful”, the president said Wednesday.
The White House said USA officials are still reviewing information Turkey provided about Gulen and whether the submission qualifies as a formal extradition request.
“We will continue the fight. wherever they might be”. “These people have infiltrated the state organization in this country and they rebelled against the state”.
He compared the Gulen movement to a malignant cancer in the body that could spread and return if not eliminated.
Speaking in Washington on Thursday at a meeting of the anti-Islamic State (IS) coalition, that coordinated air-strikes and other operations against the jihadist group in Syria and Iraq, US secretary of state John Kerry, said only that Turkey had pledged that its coalition membership “will not be affected by the events [the failed coup] that have happened”.
“We never considered even the possibility that they might be involved in this kind of a treason”.
“They are traitors. They have always been two-faced, if you want, and now we see their real face very clearly”. Several American pundits ask whether Turkey is still a reliable ally. With the president in attendance, a cleric prayed for divine protection from “the malice of the educated” – an apparent reference to the extensive network of schools run by the followers of Gulen, who has denied involvement in the coup attempt. In fierce fighting involving jets, military helicopters and tanks that lasted into Saturday morning, a further 2,185 people were wounded.
Yesterday, Austria became the first country to take diplomatic action over the purge, saying it would summon the Turkish ambassador to discuss Ankara’s “increasingly authoritarian” behaviour and allegations it had been behind recent Turkish protests in Vienna.
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He also said that if rival ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service followed suit, it would not be an objective decision, adding that there was no liquidity problem in Turkey’s strong financial sector.
