|
|
Follow the Middle East Forum
|
|
|
Turkey's
Erdoğan Continues Harsh Repression of Political Opponents
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, appears as the sole
person in his country's politics who knows what he wants. Erdoğan seeks
absolute power and acts against all obstacles to his ambitions. He is
eager to identify new "enemies" whose purported conspiracies he
believes justify his harsh rule.
Through the end of October and most of November, Erdoğan has carried
out a spree of enhanced repressive measures. This latest onslaught
reflects his current fixation on a referendum, proposed for spring 2017,
to ratify or reject constitutional amendments that would provide a
dramatic increase in his presidential powers.
To hold the referendum, Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP)
must first gain a parliamentary majority authorizing its placement on the
national ballot. The party needs 330 legislative votes, out of 550, to
permit the referendum. AKP won 317 deputies in the national elections of
November 2015. AKP lacks the two-thirds majority, or 367 parliamentary
seats, to allow immediate enactment of the constitutional changes.
Erdoğan hopes to win a referendum
next year to dramatically increase his presidential powers.
|
Erdoğan is promised a coalition majority of 357 for a referendum by
joining with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which has 40 seats.
MHP is an extremist party with a background of anti-secularist violence
during the 1970s and anti-Kurdish agitation.
From 2012 to 2015 the Turkish authorities conducted a "peace
process" with the Turkish Kurds. Erdoğan sought backing from the
Kurdish-dominated People's Democratic Party (HDP)—the third biggest force
in the national legislature, with 59 deputies, after the November 2015
election—for his reinforcement of the presidency. When the HDP declined
to support him, the ceasefire collapsed and fighting resumed in Turkey's
Kurdish southeast.
On November 4, HDP chairperson Selahattin Demirtaş was arrested, as noted by the Guardian, with at least 10 of his
colleagues in the party's leadership. The HDP representatives'
parliamentary immunity from prosecution was abolished this year.
|
HDP
Chairman Selahattin Demirtaş was arrested on November 4.
|
According to Erdoğan's government, the HDP, as a Kurdish-interest
party, is a front for the radical Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). But as
the London Independent pointed out, the HDP alleges they are under attack
for "daring to oppose" the new presidential system. HDP chief
Demirtaş had made defiance of the scheme a priority for his party,
denouncing it as leading to a dictatorship.
On November 17, the New York Times observed that the number of journalists arrested in
Turkey since the coup attempt in July has reached 120. Of them, 10 were
employed by Cumhuriyet (Republic), the country's leading newspaper
and a pillar of the secular tradition known as "Kemalism" for
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who modernized Turkey beginning in the 1920s. Cumhuriyet
is the last independent media institution under Erdoğan's rule.
At the end of October, the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, Murat
Sabuncu, was arrested with a group of his colleagues. On November 11, Cumhuriyet's
chairman, Akin Atalay, was detained at Istanbul's Atatürk Airport. All are
charged by Ankara with terrorism.
The assault on Cumhuriyet, the favorite media of the secular
elite, suggests that in the wake of the crackdown on the HDP, the
Republican People's Party (CHP), which represents the Kemalist legacy in
politics, will be a fresh target of Erdoğan's rage. Removal of
parliamentary immunity for the HDP could be extended to the 134 CHP
deputies.
|
Turkey's
ruling party filed a criminal complaint against CHP leader Kemal
Kilicdaroglu on November 8.
|
The CHP is an opposition party, but it has echoed the AKP in blaming
the failed July coup on the followers of the Sufi preacher Fethullah
Gülen, who lives in Pennsylvania. Yet already on November 8, Erdoğan and
the AKP filed a criminal complaint against CHP head Kemal
Kılıçdaroğlu and several CHP elected representatives for allegedly
"insulting the president." The CHP luminaries had expressed
concern about the consequences of Erdoğan's post-July state of emergency,
which remains in effect.
Erdoğan pursues his aims step by step while his critics merely repeat
their familiar rhetoric. The opposition appears disoriented when their
habits are compared with the tactical finesse of Erdogan and his capacity
for opportunistic cooperation. The AKP's history is one of forming
temporary coalitions, then turning against its partners in fulfillment of
Erdoğan's whims.
From 2002, when the AKP first assumed power, until 2013, the party
maintained its most important alliance with the religious Gülen movement,
in repudiation of the secularist tradition. But once the secular
establishment had been curbed, Erdoğan turned on Gülen, declaring the
exiled cleric and his followers to be "terrorists" in the wake
of the July attempt against the regime.
Erdoğan pursues his aims step by
step while his critics merely repeat their familiar rhetoric.
|
The anti-AKP forces seem incapable of an effective defense for the
detained Kurdish parliamentarians and the journalists, to say nothing of
the Gülenists. Since the July events, Erdoğan's regime has arrested some 37,000 people, fired or suspended
100,000 from government and academic employment, and shut down 170 media
enterprises.
Leading politicians in the European Union, for their part, have
protested against the arrest of the HDP legislators and the Cumhuriyet
journalists. Austrian federal chancellor Christian Kern, a Social
Democrat, condemned Erdoğan in a Facebook post for leading
Turkey "away from the European values of democracy, the rule of law,
and human rights." Kern called on the EU to stop financial
assistance to Turkey under an agreement to halt migrants from using the
country as a platform for illegal entry to the European mainland.
Erdoğan, according to the state Anadolu news agency on November 6, repeated his argument that the HDP is merely a
political tool of the PKK. "If you [the HDP MPs] act like a
terrorist instead of a lawmaker then you are treated like terrorists...
I'm clear. I have no worries about these international attacks. Only the
nation matters to me," he thundered. He went on to charge that
"Europe recognizes the PKK as a terrorist group but acts as an
accessory to them."
Turkish minister for EU affairs Ömer Çelik defended the mass arrests
in his country. He asserted that the Gülen movement are "more
dangerous than Nazis."
But other prominent EU figures have applied the Nazi comparison to
Erdoğan's regime, rather than to his opponents. As reported by Deutsche Welle on November 7, Luxembourg
foreign minister Jean Asselborn has said of the Turkish government
actions, "To put it bluntly, these are methods that were used during
the Nazi era."
In response, Çelik repeated the Erdoğan line, saying "The Nazis
are like apprentices when compared with Gülenist terror
organizations."
Stephen Schwartz, a fellow at the
Middle East Forum, is executive director of the Center for Islamic
Pluralism in Washington, DC. Veli Sirin is European director of the
Center for Islamic Pluralism.
|
|
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment