Turkey's
Night of Long Knives
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Slightly edited version of an article originally published on
September 18 under the title "The 'Great Turkish Purge': Guilty
Without Trial."
In the twelve days ending on July 2, 1934 the Nazi regime carried out
a series of executions against its remaining political opponents,
claiming they were involved in plots by Sturmabteilung (SA) commander
Ernst Röhm and others to overthrow the government. Hundreds were killed.
The regime did not limit itself to a purge of the SA. Having already
imprisoned social democrats and communists, Hitler used the so-called
"Röhm Putsch" as an excuse to move against conservatives. More
killings followed, including Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler's predecessor as
Chancellor, and von Schleicher's wife. The Gestapo also murdered several
leaders of the disbanded Catholic Center Party.
Just a few years later, the Soviets' own purge would be called Yezhovshchina
("Times of Yezhov"), after Nikolai Yezhov, head of the Soviet
secret police. From 1936 until 1953, Yezhovshchina not only meant
being expelled from the party; it came to mean almost certain arrest,
imprisonment, and often execution.
The Great Turkish Purge of 2016
brings tragedy to millions suspected of supporting Fethullah Gulen.
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The purge, in general, was Stalin's effort to eliminate past and
potential opposition groups. Hundreds of thousands of victims faced
charges of political crimes such as espionage, sabotage, anti-Soviet
agitation, and conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups. Most victims
were quickly executed by gunfire or sent to the Gulag labor camps, where
many died of starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.
Several decades later, the Turks are luckier: no Gestapo, no executions,
no summary killings and no labor camps. But the "Great Turkish
Purge" brings tragic misfortunes to millions of Turks who are
suspected of having allied with Fethullah Gulen, once President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan's best political ally, now his worst enemy and the prime
suspect behind the failed coup of July 15. Gulen, in self-exile in the
United States since 1999, is an Islamic preacher believed to have
millions of loyalists in Turkey and more than 150 other countries, where
he runs schools and charity work.
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Since
Turkey's failed July 15 coup attempt, tens of thousands of people have
been jailed and over 100,000 civil servants have been fired from their
jobs.
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During the month and a half after July 15, the Turkish government aggressively purged more than 100,000 civil servants
and military personnel, and arrested tens of thousands, including nearly
half of Turkey's active-duty admirals and generals. Anyone can be the
target: journalists, academics, teachers, pilots, doctors, businessmen --
even the owner of the small grocery store on the corner, if its owner
kept his savings at a bank that the government claims financed Gulen's
illegal activities.
Some of Turkey's biggest companies are also under the spotlight. In
August, a court appointed trustees to Boydak Holding, on
charges of the multibillion-dollar group's alleged ties with Gulen. The
family-based group's 42 companies have interests in furniture, textiles,
chemicals, marketing, logistics and energy. The group employs a staff of
more than 14,000.
In September, 18 companies operating under Koza-Ipek Holding, worth
$10 billion, were brought under the control of a state fund. According to a cabinet
minister, the Turkish state has so far seized more than $4 billion worth of assets belonging
to suspected Gulenists.
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A
Turkish prosecutor claims that journalist Ahmet Altan (left) and his
brother, professor Mehmet Altan, sent out seditious "subliminal
messages" during a TV debate.
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On a single day, September 8, Turkey arrested 27 businessmen and 50 military officers. Two
days later, prominent journalist Ahmet Altan and his brother, academic
and columnist Professor Mehmet Altan, were detained for questioning. A prosecutor claims that
during a recent TV debate, the suspects had given "subliminal
messages suggesting a military coup."
During the purge, even the simplest universal legal norms are being
systematically ignored. In one instance, the wife of the former
editor-in-chief of the daily Cumhuriyet was banned from flying to Germany, and her passport was
seized. Dilek Dundar's husband, Can Dundar, is on trial on charges of
"revealing state secrets," after he ran front-page stories
showing arms shipments from the Turkish government to radical fighters in
Syria. In another case, a file photo shows 64-year-old Hatice Yildirim in a wheelchair, with police officers
around her. The elderly woman was detained because she is the
mother-in-law of one of the coup suspects, Adil Oksuz.
As in Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s Turkey's purge is
spreading to another group of usual suspects: Kurds. On September 8,
Turkey suspended more than 11,000 schoolteachers for
suspected links with the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a group
that is on the list of terror organizations of Turkey, the U.S. and the
EU. The mass suspension came without a court ruling to determine that all
of these people were tried on charges of terror and all were found
guilty, with their appeals rejected. No, the schoolteachers were not even
on trial when they were informed that they had been suspended. Guilty
without trial.
On September 11, Turkey's Interior Ministry appointed trustees to 28 local municipalities across
the country's predominantly Kurdish southeast, on the grounds that they
allegedly provided support to the PKK and Gulen's network. Elected
mayors, too, were suspended without a court ruling that proves they have
links with terror groups.
There are warnings, mostly going unnoticed by the ruling party, that
the Turkish purge violates basic civil liberties. "If you try to run
the country with the feelings of revenge and hatred, then you will cause
suffering for many innocent people. This is the point we have reached
now. A total witch hunt has been launched in many fields," said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition
Social Democrat party.
According to Thorbjorn Jagland, secretary general of
the Council of Europe (which enforces human rights in the European Court
of Human Rights), Turkey must produce clear evidence in pursuing
participants in a failed coup, and avoid targeting teachers and
journalists simply because they worked for firms run by the Muslim cleric
Ankara portrays as its mastermind. Otherwise, Jagland said, Turkey may be
challenged in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Times after attempted coups are always turbulent. With the excesses of
a witch-hunt, Erdogan is now adding millions to an already long list of
Turks who deeply dislike him. Meanwhile, Turkey is getting more and more
distant from the utopia of becoming a country of peace and order.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based
columnist for the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow at the Middle
East Forum.
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