Gulen has strongly denied the government’s charges, suggesting the attempted military coup in Turkey could have been staged as a pretext for the Erdogan government to seize even more power.
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On Wednesday, officials announced that 99 of Turkey’s 360 military generals have been charged over their alleged roles in last Friday’s attempt to overthrow the government.
“This measure is in no way against democracy, the law and freedoms”, Erdogan said Wednesday after a meeting with Cabinet ministers and security advisers.
Turkey’s president has declared a state of emergency for three months following Friday night’s failed army coup. The failed putsch and the purge that followed it have both unsettled the country of 80 million, which borders Syria’s chaos and is a Western ally against DAESH.
“Portraying Tayyip Erdogan and the fascist AKP dictator as if they were democratic after this coup attempt is an approach even more risky than the coup attempt itself”, said the umbrella Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) in a statement on Saturday.
“The types of arrests and roundups that you cite have not gone unnoticed by us”, he said. State TRT television said 95 academics had been removed from their posts at Istanbul University alone.
Government supporters burn pictures depicting Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen during a protest in Taksim Square, in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016.
On the contrary now that Turkey will be run by a state of emergency they are only trying to stall a country that has emerged from a massive trauma called “the bloodiest and most barbaric coup attempt” in Turkish history.
Turkey has also banned academics from travelling overseas as it continues to widen a purge that has so far resulted in 60,000 state officials being arrested or suspended. The crackdown also extended to civil servants in the environment and sports ministries. He said that 28 soldiers had been involved in the attack on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his resort in Marmaris on Saturday – 14 of them were arrested on Tuesday. Gulen-linked media also avoided criticizing Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies.
The Turkish government confirmed that 6,500 employees at Turkey’s education ministry had been suspended.
The prime minister added that it might “be necessary to reconsider friendship” with the US. Turkish government officials have indicated that authorities may move to take more control over the armed forces. Sarah El Deeb, Cinar Kiper and Mstislav Chernov in Istanbul also contributed reporting.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, expressed “serious alarm” at the mass suspension and arrests of judges and prosecutors and urged Turkey to allow independent monitors to visit those who have been detained.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the measure was being taken to counter threats to Turkish democracy.
The Times notes, however, that in happier times, some US officials embraced Gulen as a “moderate Islamic leader: someone who promotes interfaith dialogue, leads a worldwide network of charities and secular schools, favors good relations with Israel and opposes harder-line Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas”.
The preacher’s followers have a powerful presence in Turkish society, including the media, police and judiciary, and Erdogan has long accused him of running a “parallel state” in Turkey. It was a shocking sight, she said: “I felt violated”. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said over the weekend that the United States would consider extradition, but only if presented with compelling evidence. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. State Department, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. “We need to improve our fraternity”. Relations between our countries are based on interests, not feelings. Such headlines could be a way of exerting pressure on the U.S.to extradite Gulen.
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The lira TRYTOM=D3 fell to a record low after ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut Turkey’s foreign currency credit rating, citing the fragmentation of the political landscape and saying it expected a period of heightened unpredictability.
