Cyprus-Forum.com

[Demonax]

A thread to document increasing repression in Turkey against its own citizens.

Welcome to the Turkish Republic of Police State

Turkey has become a country where the ruling party representing half of the country’s electorate is exercising the state’s police (and military if needed) force in the most brutal way on the other half of electorate, who launched a massive uprising against the government’s growing authoritarian inclinations...

At the core of this behavior lies the “us and them” policy/rhetoric of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose purpose is to discriminate against those who do not share the conservative lifestyle of a pious Muslim and create a sort of “neighborhood pressure” on them. But this oppression is not limited to the scope of the secular-conservative debate in Turkey as the trend of this behavior is to expand its influence on different segments of the society through intimidation.

The other half of this equation (i.e. them) includes social democrats, some nationalist groups, Alevis, communists, socialists, academics of dissident universities, trade unionists, artists, social media activists, “twitterers” in English, sympathizers of the Gezi Park demonstrators, alcohol-cigarette consumers, those who are against having three kids, defenders of the right to abortion. Intellectuals and journalists are also in this camp but they do not necessarily have to be in either camp as their full obedience or self-censorship is must to keep their job...

This growing nationalist-conservative language/policy that has a divisive effect on political and social life of Turkey will not only nix hopes for a new pro-freedom Constitution but will also have destructive shocks on the ongoing Kurdish peace process and on Turkey’s European Union relations. One last thing to do, then, would be changing the country’s official name as introduced in the headline of this column.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/welcom ... sCatID=429

[Demonax]

Turkey's 'Anti-Terror' Law Casts Increasingly Wide Net

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratic reform package is facing criticism following the Justice Ministry's revelation that 20,000 people have been convicted under the country's anti-terrorism law during the last four years, 8,000 of whom were jailed just in the last 12 months. Most of them, including journalists and members of the country's legal Kurdish party, were jailed for non-violent offenses.

Turkey’s anti-terror law is facing growing national and international criticism. The law was introduced in 1991 to counter an insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. But concerns have been growing that the law is increasingly used to target critics of the government.

Emma Sinclair Webb, senior researcher on Turkey for the U.S.-based organization Human rights Watch, says there has been an alarming increase in the use of the anti-terror law.

"According to official figures of the Justice Ministry, in the last four years an enormous number of people - somewhere around 40,000 - have been prosecuted for membership of armed organizations, and half of them have received convictions under that law. Now it applies disproportionately to Kurds in Turkey, but it also applies to other groups: it has been used against leftists, it has been used against journalists, students, for activities which could not in any way be counted as terrorism," said Webb....

According to international human rights groups, the anti-terror law is the reason why Turkey is the world’s biggest jailer of journalists. Award-winning journalist Ahmet Şık, who is facing 15 years in jail under the law, says it is a threat to democracy in Turkey.

"We live in a time in which students demanding free education are immediately labeled as terrorists. Journalists are also seen as terrorists. There is an incredible regime of suppression, he says: whoever raises their voice in opposition can be imprisoned on terrorism charges," said Şık.

http://www.voanews.com/content/turkey-a ... 72399.html

[Demonax]

Turkey’s newest political prisoners

A Turkish court has confirmed the sentences on more than 200 suspects in a fantastical coup plot. Make no mistake: this is a travesty of justice; the men are in prison not because they plotted a coup or, indeed, did anything against the government, nor because they are anti-religious. Rather, their crime is that they believe in a separation of mosque and state.

What about the charges? That they planned to sow chaos in order to give an excuse for the military to step in and restore order? In the feverish minds of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s supporters, such conspiracies may make sense. The problem is that the evidence has been so clearly fabricated: The documents seized (what kind of coup plotters write in excruciating detail their step-by-step plans?) are written in Mircrosoft Word 2007, but the plot took place in 2003, when MS Word 2007 didn’t exist. Perhaps Bill Gates was in on it, or perhaps we need to recognize the situation for what it is:

Those former generals, journalists, academicians, and intellectuals who had their sentences confirmed are political prisoners. The Turkish judiciary—now thoroughly dominated by Erdoğan supporters—has become a joke, albeit a tragic one. Many diplomats—including Namik Tan, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States—may privately tell friends and associates he doesn’t like what’s going on, but he is too frightened and careerist to stand up on principle, and the Turkish security forces have effectively become Erdoğan’s Brownshirts.

And while Erdoğan may enjoy his sultan’s power to throw political and intellectual opponents in prison for opposing his whims and while he may rant and rave about imagined coup plots or righting historical wrongs, if Erdoğan wants to see the true coup leader, he need only look in the mirror, because he has led an “autogolpe” not much different than Alberto Fujimori did in Peru 21 years ago. Fujimori later fled to Japan—my bet is Erdoğan will choose Saudi Arabia as his country of exile—but was subsequently arrested and returned to Peru where he remains in prison. Against the backdrop of unexplained personal enrichment, abuse-of-power, and nepotism, I suspect Erdoğan will end his career in much the same fashion as Fujimori. Until that day, make no mistake: those arrested on the “Balyoz” coup plot are political prisoners, and Erdoğan has become a coup leader no different than those of 1960 or 1980.

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/10/turkey ... oners/#mbl

[Demonax]

Turkey Shifts Toward Autocracy

I’ve now spent almost a decade writing about the transformation in Turkey. A decade ago, Turkey was a Western-leaning democracy, however flawed, with a largely free even if cantankerous press. Now, Turkey leans firmly toward the Arab world and China, has a prime minister who seems a blend of Vladimir Putin and an Ottoman Sultan, and has not only cracked down on press freedom, but now also seems to be penalizing “thought crime.”

Two-and-a-half years ago, for example, Turkish police raided the home and office of Ahmet Şık in order to confiscate his unpublished manuscript in which he demonstrated penetration of the Turkish security forces by the followers of controversial Islamist leader Fethullah Gülen. Now, a Turkish writer is to be prosecuted for making a word play on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s middle name:

[Emrah] Serbes had made a pun in a TV show by changing the prime minister’s middle name “Tayyip” to “Tazyik,” a word meaning pressurized water in reference to the police’s excessive use of water cannons and tear gas against protesters during the most recent May Day.

Serbes could serve up to 12 years in prison.

It gets worse: Earlier this year, Turkey was rocked by protests against the destruction of one of the few remaining green spaces in central Istanbul. The protests shook Erdoğan, who is unaccustomed to public criticism. Indeed, at a recent rally in Adana, photographers spotted gas masks under the chairs of Erdoğan and his wife, just in case. Well, now even thinking about protesting is a crime in Turkey. The Justice and Interior Ministry, both controlled by Erdoğan’s political party, has issued new regulations authorizing without any judicial action the detention for up to one day of anyone at “risk of conducting a protest.”

The lesson learned? Both Bush and Obama let Turkey slip away with a series of ambassadors more prone to sycophancy than hard talk and with political correctness blunting observation of Erdoğan’s Islamist agenda. In the short run, however, I guess the lesson learned is simply not to think bad thoughts about the Tazyik-in-chief next time anyone should pass through Istanbul.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/ ... autocracy/