President Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised the issue in a phone call Tuesday with U.S. President Barack Obama, and his spokesman said the government was preparing a formal extradition request for Gulen.
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The Turkish government is closing down schools, firing academics and university deans, and banning global travel for professors, in the latest measures in response to last week’s coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey had demanded that Gulen, who was living in the USA state of Pennsylvania, be extradited.
“There could be”, Erdogan said, asked if other countries could have been involved in the coup in an interview with Al-Jazeera.
The Turkish government under Erdogan has now arrested, fired or suspended a total of more than 50,000 people in its post-coup d’etat attempt crackdown.
The lira weakened to beyond 3 to the US dollar after state broadcaster TRT said all university deans had been ordered to resign, recalling the sorts of broad purges seen in the wake of successful military coups of the past.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Turkish government said it will close more than 600 private schools and dormitories in response to the failed coup.
The country’s Religious Affairs Directorate has banned religious funerals for supporters of the attempted coup, the Anadolu news agency reported.
“Portraying Tayyip Erdogan and the fascist AKP dictator as if they were democratic after this coup attempt is an approach even more unsafe than the coup attempt itself”, said the umbrella Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) in a statement on Saturday.
Addressing hundreds of supporters outside his Istanbul residence in the early hours of Tuesday, Erdogan responded to calls for the death penalty with the simple statement: “You can not put aside the people’s demands”.
“We have never made compromises on democracy”.
A group with control of units within the military, calling itself The Council for Peace in the Country besieged several public buildings in Ankara and Istanbul between Friday night and Saturday morning. Turkey is a candidate for future membership in the European Union, but the likelihood of its actual joining, already low before the coup attempt, is even lower now after the government launched a sweeping crackdown on people it deems were behind the uprising.
He also told Al Jazeera it would be a “big mistake” if the United States failed to extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania and is accused of masterminding the plot.
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In the aftermath of a failed military coup last Friday, July 15, the government of Turkey is pointing fingers wherever it can.
