A Turkish court formally arrested 14 more people on Sunday for ties to an alleged secularist plot by ultranationalists to bring down the Islamic-rooted government, bringing the total of people involved in the case to more than 100.
The prime minister said the crackdown will shed light on a network of renegade agents within the state and make Turkey transparent. Critics say it is designed to silence the government’s opponents.
The case highlights a difficult question about who holds the levers of power in a country where tensions between secularists and Islamists, and liberals and rightists, have created deep fault lines in the country.
The problem is aggravated by key demands from the EU — which Turkey hopes to join — to reduce the military’s influence in politics, make security officials accountable for torture and grant more rights to the country’s Kurds.
Over the weekend, an Istanbul anti-terror court formally arrested and jailed 18 coup plot suspects, including a former police chief and four active duty military officers. Fourteen of the 18 were arrested on Sunday.
Police detained another 33 suspects in the case on Sunday and displayed confiscated weapons. Prosecutors say the plot aimed to destabilize Turkey through a series of attacks and trigger a coup this year.
There are already 86 suspects on trial in the case and they include a top author, a political party leader, journalists, a former university dean and a lawyer along with 16 retired military officers. All were outspoken opponents of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan’s party — which narrowly escaped a ban last year for allegedly undermining the country’s secular principles — says it is trying to strengthen democracy to steer the country toward EU membership even as allegations mount from the secular opposition that the government is using its power to silence critics.
“Are you afraid of seeing Turkey becoming more transparent? Are you afraid of efforts to enlighten sinister incidents?” Erdogan shouted on Sunday. “Turkey is changing.”
Erdogan has alarmed secularists for trying to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves at universities, and nationalists for policies such as launching the country’s first 24-hour Kurdish-language TV station on Jan. 1. He uttered a few words in the once-banned tongue in a marked shift policy toward Kurds.
Turkey’s military, an instigator of coups in past decades, has warned that secular ideals are in peril, though an armed intervention seems unlikely for now. But many officers are uncomfortable with the government’s Kurdish policy as they fight a war against autonomy-seeking rebels that has killed nearly 40,000 people since 1984.
The coup plot case underlines a widening divide between the country’s growing Islamic class and secularists.
The roots of the conflict lie in the era of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and early 20th-century war hero who viewed Islam as an impediment to modern development and a symbol of the ills of the Ottoman Empire.
Ataturk imposed a secular system with an authoritarian streak, restricting religious dress, education and practices.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
Hundreds of thousands of Guyana citizens living at home and abroad would receive a payout of about US$478 each after the country announced it was distributing its “mind-boggling” oil wealth. The grant of 100,000 Guyanese dollars would be available to any citizen of the South American country aged 18 and older with a valid passport or identification card. Guyanese citizens who normally live abroad would be eligible, but must be in Guyana to collect the payment. The payout was originally planned as a 200,000 Guyanese dollar grant for each household in the country, but was reframed after concerns that some citizens, including
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
RSS