Turks found their country locked in a state of emergency Thursday as their President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, vowed to root out perceived enemies of the state following a failed coup over the weekend.
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“This parallel terrorist organisation will no longer be an effective pawn for any country”, he said, referring to what the government has long alleged is a state within a state controlled by Mr Gulen’s followers. Turkey’s state-run news agency also reported that the education ministry was closing 626 private schools under investigation for “crimes against the constitutional order and the running of that order”.
More than 50,000 people have been rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs by Turkey’s government in the wake of last week’s failed coup.
Gulen dismissed the allegations he was involved in what he called “treason, a betrayal of the Turkish nation”, and said he was not concerned by the extradition move.
The declaration of the state of emergency raised further concerns about restrictions on freedoms and rights in Turkey, which was stunned by a failed coup attempt on Friday.
Fethullah Gulen is believed by Ankara to be the mastermind behind the recent military coup attempt. “They will have to make their judgments applying our legal standards to whatever has been put forward”, he said.
Tens of thousands of civil service employees, including teachers, accused of ties to the plot or suspected of links to a U.S.-based cleric whom authorities accuse of being the behind the plot, have also been fired.
He chaired a meeting of the National Security Council for almost five hours on Wednesday.
He also told Al-Jazeera that in the aftermath of the attempted coup he would support reinstating the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004 as part of a bid for European Union membership.
Turkey’s higher education council has banned academics from leaving the country and urged ones overseas to quickly return home as a temporary measure, according to state media and a Turkish official. About a third of Turkey’s roughly 360 serving generals have been detained, with 99 charged pending trial and 14 more being held.
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Faruk Logoglu, a former Turkish ambassador to the USA and an opposition party a member of parliament from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), said that the coup “will reinforce Erdogan’s powers and allow him to limit the freedoms that remain”.
