One year after the failed coup in Turkey, the crackdown continues | World news
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, beamed as he looked upon the sea of red Turkish flags nearly a year ago.
Millions had gathered in Istanbul’s Yenikapı Square near the shore of the Sea of Marmara for a roaring celebration of the people’s sacrifice and victory against coup plotters who had nearly overthrown the democratically elected government.
It was a rare show of unity, with citizens of all stripes overtaken by patriotic sentiment, before a stage that was shared by the president, the prime minister, and two leaders of the opposition. “My precious nation that once again stood up for its independence and future,†ErdoÄŸan said. “I greet you with heartfelt feelings, and with longing.â€
Days earlier, the president, who barely escaped an assault by putschists at his holiday home in the resort of Marmaris, had taken to FaceTime to urge his fellow citizens to go to the streets and resist the military takeover, and they answered the call. More than 240 Turks gave their lives facing the tanks that had seized control of the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul and key military facilities in Ankara.
Many hoped the “spirit of Yenikapi†would prevail, and the country would unite under the banner of democracy and mutual respect after months of instability, terror attacks, elections and the reigniting of the conflict between the state and Kurdish separatists.
It was not to be. Over the year since the traumatic coup attempt on 15 July, 50,000 people have been remanded in custody and 170,000 suspects investigated for links to the shadowy group believed to have masterminded the coup. It is a nation more divided than ever, its newspapers silenced, its opposition intimidated, and Erdoğan’s power now rivals that of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Erdoğan’s narrow victory in April’s referendum on the constitution transformed Turkey from a parliamentary democracy into a presidential system, vastly expanding the president’s power over the judiciary and allowing him to run for two more election cycles, potentially leading the country as a powerful executive until 2029.
But it also highlighted the deep rifts in a society that has grown increasingly divided, along traditional lines of secularism, Islamism and ethnicity, as well as class differences. There is a clear line between those who believe he is a champion of the impoverished and a strongman on the world stage, and those who believe he is rolling back democracy and reshaping the state in his image.
Even with such a close result, ErdoÄŸan had outmanoeuvred an opposition that is also divided and â€" despite the hundreds of thousands who turned out to support a march for justice last week â€" still faces the uphill task of challenging his authority in presidential elections two years from now.
Details of the evidence against Fethullah Gülen, an exiled preacher and former ally of the president whose movement is widely believed in Turkey to have orchestrated the coup, remain hidden from public view.
The reclusive cleric has not been extradited from his home in the United States and few of the coup’s generals have admitted affiliation with his movement. A key civilian suspect close to Gülen who was at a coup-controlled airbase on that night has fled and remains at large.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s western allies have raised concerns over the panoply of human rights abuses under the state of emergency.
The government has fired tens of thousands of public employees, and the commission tasked with hearing appeals has yet to begin its work nearly a year later. Thousands of people have been incarcerated in the months after the coup without formal indictments, including hundreds of judges, and just last week the authorities arrested a group of human rights defenders including the two top officials of Amnesty International in Turkey, an organisation that once campaigned on behalf of ErdoÄŸan when he was a prisoner of conscience before he came to power.
“Indeed, if anyone was still in doubt about the endgame of Turkey’s post-coup crackdown, they should not be now,†Salil Shetty, the organisation’s secretary general, wrote in the Guardian. “There is to be no civil society, no criticism and no accountability in ErdoÄŸan’s Turkey.â€
The net of arrests has widened to include several journalists such as Nedim Åžener and Ahmet Şık who authored investigations into and were prosecuted by the Gülenists when they were in power as allies of ErdoÄŸan â€" with the charge that they are themselves Gülenists.
Senior opposition lawmakers, including the charismatic chief of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), have been jailed with accusations of affiliation to terrorist organisations, and the party’s cadres around the country have been repeatedly harassed and detained.
“The declaration of emergency rule … has turned Turkey into a cemetery for human rights and fundamental freedoms,†HiÅŸyar Özsoy, an HDP MP, said recently after the European parliament called in a resolution to suspend EU negotiations with Turkey. “Currently there is no rule of law, no separation of powers, and no independent judiciary in the country.â€
Internationally, relations have soured with the EU, with the accession negotiations frozen, and the western bloc’s lack of overt support for Ankara after the coup attempt has left a sour taste. The president has repeatedly expressed his readiness to reinstate the death penalty, which would spell the end of talks.
Turkey also is at loggerheads with the US, which is supporting Kurdish paramilitaries in their campaign against Isis in its Syrian stronghold, Raqqa. The presence of Isis on the border and the expansion of the sphere of control of Kurdish forces prompted Ankara to launch a military intervention in August last year, just a month after the abortive coup, backing a rebel alliance as they swept through northern Syria.
As the president and his Justice and Development (AK) party consolidate their power, there are few indications that the rifts will heal.
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