Police hit by wide-ranging ‘imam’ purge
TURKEY: About 14,000 Turkish police officers face arrest or suspension in a huge purge as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tightens his grip on the state.
More than 9000 have been suspended and 1120 arrested over the past 48 hours, with warrants issued for a further 3000.
The fresh crackdown comes nine days after Erdogan won a constitutional referendum handing him sweeping powers and the potential to stay in office until 2029. He now appears to be turning his attention to crushing the last of the opposition within the state bureaucracy.
The arrested officers are accused of being ‘‘secrets imams’’ proselytising for the Gulen movement, a secretive Islamic faction that allegedly used a network of businesses, private schools and university dormitories to infiltrate the Turkish state and politics over decades.
Erdogan declared war on the Gulenists in early 2014, but the purge has intensified since a coup attempt last summer that was blamed on Fethullah Gulen and his supporters. More than 113,000 people have been arrested since July and 47,000 remain in detention, 12,000 of them police officers.
The purge has extended to the judiciary, the military and all parts of the civil service. More than 130,000 people have lost their jobs.
‘‘There were no warnings, no investigations,’’ said a former municipality clerk who lost his job in October. ‘‘They say I am linked to a terrorist organisation, but they didn’t say which one.’’
The Turkish government insists that the purge is necessary to weed out coup plotters, adding that many are reinstated or released once they have been investigated. However, there is growing international concern over the scale of the arrests and sackings as well as over the targets, which appear to have extended beyond Gulenist members to all of Erdogan’s political opponents.
Dozens of Kurdish media channels are among the 149 news organisations shut down, most accused of propagandising for the banned PKK. However, some appear to have been targeted because they were broadcasting footage of the conflict between the PKK and security forces in eastern Turkey.
Refik Tekin, formerly a cameraman with the IMC television channel, was shot by Turkish security forces as he filmed civilians trying to reach a hospital in Cizre, eastern Turkey. The footage went viral, and IMC was closed nine months later.
‘‘I can’t find jobs because there is only pro-government media left,’’ Tekin said. ‘‘The other problem is that they are only giving press cards to journalists close to them.’’ - The Times