Erdogan begins term with purge of 18,000 ‘traitors’

A purge of more than 18,000 police, soldiers, judges, academics and other civil servants began in Turkey yesterday as president Recep Tayyip Erdogan prepared to assume the greater powers he will exercise from this week.

Erdogan will be inaugurated as president for a second term today after his victory in the first round of elections last month. The purge, ordered under a state of emergency that has been in place since an attempted coup in

2016, was a significant statement of intent.

Among his other powers created during constitutional changes approved in a referendum last year will be the right to start and end states of emergency unilaterally.

There is likely to be no let-up in his hostility to the Gulen movement, a former Islamist ally that he now regards as a terrorist movement.

The decree specified that the

18,632 people to lose their jobs were suspected of involvement with organisations that acted against the interests of national security. They include 8998 police officers, 3077 soldiers, 1949 from the air force and 1126 from the navy. On the civilian side, 1052 civil servants were sacked from the Justice Ministry and linked institutions, 649 went from the police, 192 from the coastguard and 199 academics lost their jobs.

More than 100,000 civil servants have been fired since 2016, and the army is said to be significantly under strength.

More than 75,000 people have been arrested for connections to the Gulen movement, and many have been sentenced to long jail terms, including for alleged involvement in the coup.

Named after its leader, Fethullah Gulen, the movement operated for years as a social support network with Erdogan’s tacit backing, running schools and charities. As it had members inside the police, prosecution and civil services, he came to see it as a state within a state.