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.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home