Tillerson should stand up for Turkish citizens

This appeared on Tuesday's Washington Post:

On Sunday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson praised the "brave men and women" of Turkey who "stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy" during a failed coup attempt last July. He was right to do so. Unfortunately, he failed then to salute the brave men and women who have stood up against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's brutal purge of dissidents and independent media since the fizzled coup.

In ignoring the disturbing events of the past year, Tillerson may have been hoping to curry favor with the Turkish president before a crucial discussion on regional security. Turkey, jarringly, is an increasingly repressive nation but also a NATO ally; an Islamic-majority country growing increasingly hostile to secular liberalism but also a partner in the U.S. engagement in Syria. In other words, it's complicated.

But complications don't mean itis necessary, or beneficial, for the United States to toss aside its own ideals. Erdogan's regime has grown steadily less tolerant. In April he engineered a referendum that polarized the nation and granted him a broad range of autocratic powers. Turkish authorities have suspended approximately 150,000 government workers and detained more than 110,000 people, including journalists, civil society activists and judges. Just last week, the director of Amnesty International Turkey and nine others were detained during a training session for human rights defenders, the latest in a long line of arbitrary arrests. Erdogan's security guards evenfelt free to beat up protesters in the heart of Washington.

On the day that Tillerson arrived in Turkey, tens of thousands of citizens rallied at the end of a march for justice from Ankara to Istanbul. They, too, are brave men and women. Why not say so? Even a proponent of a "realist" foreign policy should understand that failing to show support for millions of democratically minded Turkish citizens is not in the United States' long-term interest. And decades of precedent, during and since the Cold War, show that it is perfectly possible for U.S. diplomats to conduct serious business with autocrats while at least speaking up for human rights and the defenders of freedom, no matter how beleaguered.