Turkey tries to function amid government purge
More than 8,000 army officers, 8,000 police officers, 5,000 academics and 4,000 judges and prosecutors have been forced out
When Aynur Barkin became one of roughly 40,000 teachers purged from Turkey’s education system after last year’s attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, she was not immediately replaced. As a result, her second-grade students were forced to join the third grade, tripling their original class size.
“I could pay attention to each of them one by one,” said Barkin, 37, who was fired in February from a school west of Istanbul. “But their new teacher can’t do that.”
That is one example of the administrative upheaval and chaos caused by the government’s vast purge of Turkish institutions since the failed coup in July — the backdrop for a referendum on Sunday to expand the president’s powers.
Erdogan’s government has sought to root out any remaining dissent by targeting nearly every segment of society. It has also used the purge as cover for a crackdown on dissidents of all stripes, including leftists like Barkin.
The numbers are extraordinary. The government has fired or suspended about 130,000 people suspected of being dissidents from the public and private sectors. Most are accused of affiliations with the Gulen movement, the Islamic followers of Fethullah Gulen, the cleric accused of orchestrating the putsch.
More than 8,000 army officers, 8,000 police officers, 5,000 academics and 4,000 judges and prosecutors have been forced out, according to estimates.
The social cost has been significant. Watchdogs say that around 1,200 schools, 50 hospitals and 15 universities have been closed. Affected schoolchildren have usually been able to find places in local state schools — but their purged parents have mostly been frozen out of the job market.
Turkey has become “like an open-air prison,” said Sezgin Yurdakul, 40, who was fired from the Istanbul ferry system because his daughter attended a Gulen-run school on a scholarship. Yurdakul’s name is blacklisted on a national database, so no employer has yet dared to give him a new job. He, like thousands of other purged employees of the state, is now living off his savings.
The vacuum left by people like Yurdakul has prompted many Turks to question which individuals are permitted to fill the void — and which factions, if any, have benefited.
Erdogan’s allies argue that a wide range of groups has filled the void. But some claim that the gaps have been largely plugged by members of other Islamic orders, or loyalists from the president’s Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP. “The AKP’s own cadres are filling the void,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the largest opposition party. “They want to establish a bureaucratic structure that accepts whatever the politicians say.”
Mustafa Karadag, the head of the judges’ union, says that gaps in the judiciary have often been filled by novices who can provide letters of accreditation from a legal guild with links to the AKP. “This has allowed access to the judicial and prosecutorial professions to those who receive lower marks but who have a closer relationship to the government, or who are able to procure references from them,” Karadag said.
The government denies this. Ibrahim Kalin, the president’s official spokesman, said in a recent briefing with reporters that those let go had been “replaced by ordinary people” who had “all gone through very transparent, open examinations.”
But even some of the president’s critics say the situation is too chaotic, and the purges too widespread, for one faction alone to have benefited. To fill the holes in the bureaucracy and the political sphere, some say, Erdogan has had to rely on right-wing nationalists, hard-left nationalists, novices and recalled retirees, as well as party loyalists and Islamists.
“The perception among Turks is that Erdogan rules everything, but that’s not the case,” said Orhan Gazi Ertekin, a judge who heads the Democratic Judicial Association, a liberal legal watchdog. “There are various groups, all different to each other, that previously plotted against each other, but are now in alliance” against the Gulenists.
Other observers have concluded that a mix of factions has benefited from the purge of the military. Anti-American ultranationalists — known as Eurasianists — have profited at the expense of pro-NATO officers, according to two military experts at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
“It seems for now that the Eurasianists will hold on to their influence and ranks, but for how long remains a question,” Megan Gisclon and Metin Gurcan, a former officer in the Turkish special forces, wrote in a briefing last year.