“Look at your own deeds”, said the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, yesterday (Friday) at the Special Forces headquarters in Ankara.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has slammed the United States for its reaction to a failed military coup in Turkey, accusing it of harboring the man behind the plot.
Turkish suspicions about the USA have been heightened by the presence in Pennsylvania of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric and former ally of Erdogan who turned against him and went into exile.
Twenty-one journalists had appeared before a judge in hearings lasting until midnight on Friday. “Many of our interlocutors have been purged or arrested”, he said. It was a madness.
Prosecutors in the Aegean coastal city of Izmir issued orders to detain 200 police on Friday as part of the investigation targeting Gulenists, the Dogan news agency said.
The president also announced that as a gesture of goodwill after the coup he was dropping hundreds of lawsuits against individuals accused of insulting him.
There were about 2,000 cases, including cases of insults directed to Erdoğan on social media.
“Any reporting that I had anything to do with the recent unsuccessful coup attempt in Turkey is unfortunate and completely inaccurate”, Mr Votel said.
But with concern growing about the sheer numbers rounded-up, European Union enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn said he needed to see “black-and-white facts about how these people are treated”.
“And if there is even the slightest doubt that the (treatment) is improper, then the consequences will be inevitable”, he told German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Turkey announced late on Thursday a major shake-up of its armed forces, NATO’s second largest, with the promotion of 99 colonels to the rank of general or admiral and the dishonourable discharge of almost 1,700 military personnel over their alleged roles in the coup. The ministry gave them advice on how to deal with the alarming situation.
The president’s critics say Erdogan, who narrowly escaped capture and possible death on the night of the coup, is using the mass purges to crack down indiscriminately on dissent and to tighten his grip on the nation of almost 80 million. “Germany must return them”, Cavusoglu said.
“The putschist is already in your country”, Erdogan said.
He said Turkey had received intelligence that Gulen might flee to another country, so the foreign ministry was issuing “necessary warnings”.
US based cleric Fethullah Gulen at his home in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, US.
An employee of the Golden Generation, a Gulenist institution, was attacked in Deventer last Friday and said they had been forced to temporarily shut down the center due to Erdogan’s attacks on the cleric.
The commander of USA forces in the Middle East, General Joseph Votel, issued a statement Friday asserting that he had no link to the coup attempt in Turkey, an unusual move by one of the highest-ranked U.S. military leaders.
About 40% of all generals and admirals in the military have been dismissed since the coup.
Erdogan also lashed out at the West on Friday, accusing his allies of failing to show solidarity with Turkey over the failed coup, saying those who anxious over the fate of coup supporters instead of Turkish democracy could not be friends of Ankara.
The head of US Central Command, General Joseph Votel, said he believed some of the military figures whom the United States had worked with were in jail.
“You are taking the side of coup plotters instead of thanking this state for defeating the coup attempt”, Mr Erdogan said in angry remarks at a military centre in Golbasi outside Ankara, where air strikes left dozens dead during the failed putsch on July 15.
In a testimony provided following his detention, Major General Mehmet Disli, the brother of a prominent ruling party lawmaker, strongly denied allegations that he was involved in the coup, saying he had been forced by the plotters to mediate with the chief of the military’s General Staff on July 15.
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This post was syndicated from The Guardian NigeriaThe Guardian Nigeria.
