A
Lesson in Democracy for Turkey's Islamist President
IPT News
September 5, 2017
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 When Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington, D.C. this past May, he
was greeted outside the home of the Turkish ambassador by a small group of
protesters concerned about his crackdowns on civil rights and antagonism
towards Turkey's Kurdish population. Within minutes, his bodyguards sprang
into action, accompanied by others in the Turkish posse, beating and kicking the protesters – who included women
and senior citizens. A 61-year-old woman later told the Guardian she
had feared for her life after guards punched her in the face, and when
60-year-old Turkish-American Reza Dersimi tried to assist her, he, too, was
assaulted.
Local police quickly intervened, arresting several of the attackers,
including Erdogan's guards. Some of those who ran off were apprehended in
the days that followed but many remain at large.
The arrests infuriated Turkey's president. "They have incarcerated
our citizens!" cried Erdogan, who has regularly thrown foreign
journalists and human rights leaders into Turkish prisons. "How is
that possible? What type of legislation is this, what type of law?"
Now the U.S. government has indicted 19 attackers for their violent abuse of the protesters,
whom Turkish leaders accuse of having been members of the Kurdish terrorist
group PKK. (There is no evidence to suggest any protester had terror ties.)
Turkey's Foreign Ministry described the indictments as "unjust and
biased," and claimed they included "names of people that have
never been to the US." The indictment against 15 Turkish security
guards, two Turkish-Canadians, and two Turkish-Americans, contains 21
counts of assault and hate crimes, and describes the incident as a
"conspiracy to assault protesters and law enforcement officials."
"The members and associates of the conspiracy significantly
outnumbered the anti-Erdogan protesters, growing in size as the protest
continued," the indictment states. "The members and associates of
the conspiracy both vocally and physically opposed the presence of the
anti-Erdogan protesters, yelling threats and attacking the anti-Erdogan
protesters .. The members and associates of the conspiracy used threats and
physical violence – intensely kicking at protesters – to dispel the anti-Erdogan
protesters, attack the anti-Erdogan protesters, and blatantly ignore
American law enforcement commands to cease the violence."
But rather than apologize for the violence, Erdogan declared the indictment "scandalous," praised
the attackers for stepping in, and decried America's failure to protect him
from the protesters. True, some protesters did shout "Long Live the
YPG," referring to a Syrian-Kurdish militant group that the United
States has engaged, but which Turkey deems a terrorist organization, in its
fight against the Islamic State. But such cries, in a democratic state,
hardly call for a violent response.
Moreover, Erdogan's objections reek of hypocrisy. In the past two years,
his government has detained numerous foreign nationals on trumped-up
charges of "terrorism," a word Erdogan bandies about to describe
critics of his ideology or his regime, including human rights workers and
journalists. He has called on foreign governments to arrest their own
citizens for statements critical of him, such as his April 2016 demand in
April that Germany charge comedian Jan Böhmermann for his profanity-laced
poem criticizing the Turkish president.
And only days later, Dutch-Turkish columnist Ebru Umar, vacationing in
the Aegean coastal town of Kusadasi, was pulled from her bed in the middle of the night by
police and arrested for cursing Erdogan on Twitter. She was released from
custody he following day, but not permitted to leave the country for
several weeks.
Other dual-citizens have suffered similar fates or worse, such as
German-Turkish Die Welt reporter Deniz Yucel, who was arrested in February on charges of "terror
propaganda and inciting hatred," according to CNN. Yucel had
"interviewed PKK leader Cemil Bayik 'under the guise of being a
journalist' and reported on security forces' operations in Turkey's
southeast against Kurdish militants by 'undertaking propaganda by
expressing the discourses of the armed terror organization,'" the
prosecutor's office told CNN.
But it's not just dual nationals. The July arrest of German activist Peter Steudtner and several
others attending a workshop on digital security – again on terrorism
charges – led German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel to issue
a warning to Germans about visiting Turkey.
French freelance reporter Loup Bureau was also taken into custody last month,
again on charges of assisting terrorists. The charges were based not on
anything he was doing at the time, but on a 2013 story he had produced
about members of the YPG for France's TV5 Monde.
And in one particularly notorious case, Turkish police arrested British VICE reporters and
their Iraqi fixer in 2015 in Diyarbakir, a city with a large Kurdish
population. The charge: "knowingly and willfully helping the armed
terrorist organization without being part of its hierarchical
structure," according to Turkey's Anadolu News Agency. Although court
papers did not include the name of the terrorist group, the journalists'
lawyer, Tahir Elci, told Reuters, "They were accused of meeting and
siding with both the Islamic State and the PKK-affiliated group
[YDG]."
Erdogan's message here is clear: his critics and dissenters and their
associates are "terrorists" who must be subdued through violence,
imprisonment, or both; and those who oppress them, preferably through
violence and imprisonment, are the righteous ones, the heroes, the good.
That ideology, unsurprisingly, links Erdogan far more closely to
Islamist, authoritarian governments than to the democracies of the West.
Indeed, as Scott Peterson observed in the Christian Science Monitor,
"Fifteen years into his rule, Erdogan has gradually turned his country
away from the secular tradition of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the
modern state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. And there is
little room for any competing views as the once ardently secular eastern
anchor of NATO, which has aspired to membership in the European Union,
weakens once-promising linkages with the West, promotes the role of
religion in public life, clamps down on opponents and the media, and moves
ever more firmly away from democratic norms."
By contrast, in America and other Western nations, reporters are free to
follow their investigations. Peaceful protesters are free to voice their
views. And government agents may not use violence against innocent
civilians. What type of legislation is this, what type of law? It's called
democracy, Mr. Erdogan. And this is what it looks like.
Related Topics: Free
Speech, Islamist
Censorship, Prosecutions,
Turkey,
Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, protesters,
Reza
Dersimi, Jan
Böhmermann, Ebru
Umar, Deniz
Yucel, Kurds,
media
crackdowns, Peter
Steudtner, Loup
Bureau, Free
Speech, Islamist
Censorship, Prosecutions
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