Turkey slides into tyranny

The increasingly autocratic government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken yet another step on the path to destruction of a once thriving democracy.

In a series of predawn raids Monday, authorities arrested the editor-in-chief and 12 other journalists of Turkey’s oldest independent newspaper, Cumhuriyet.

Their “crimes”? Well, the Istanbul prosecutor’s office insists — with no evidence — that they were working in support of either the Kurdistan Workers Party, which it considers a terrorist organization, or the Gulan organization, which it blames for the failed coup back in July.

Prosecutors working on behalf of a tyrant apparently don’t have to be terribly specific.

That raid followed similar assaults on 15 pro-Kurdish news outlets and the shutting down of the only national Kurdish language newspaper over the weekend. In all some 160 news outlets have been shut down by the Erdogan regime since July and at least 130 journalists are being held in pre-trial detention, according to Amnesty International.

That, of course, followed the arrests of tens of thousands of judges, teachers, and civil servants — all of them supposedly linked to the failed coup, although it has been well established that the lists of those to be arrested existed well before the coup.

A series of new “emergency decrees” issued last Sunday gave Erdogan the power to appoint university heads, allowed judges to deny detainees access to an attorney for up to three months, and permits prosecutors to record lawyer-client conversations when they do occur. So much for rule of law in Turkey.

The real tragedy, however, is the paralysis of our own State Department and the European Union, which needs Erdogan to stem the flow of refugees from Syria.

Eventually the private sector will awake to the reality that a country that does not observe the rule of law is no place in which to do business. But how many journalists and judges and teachers will languish in jail until that happens?