Photo: A 2007 Protect Your Republic Day Protest, Credit: Selahattin Sonmez, edited by Dsmurat / Wikimedia Commons
Turkey has lifted the two-year-old state of emergency under which Ankara fired thousands of people from government jobs, jailed journalists and imprisoned thousands more in the wake of a failed military coup.
While supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have hailed the development, critics see the end of the state of emergency as a mere eyewash.
Several Opposition politicians and analysts argue that the occasion is nothing more than a swap for sweeping new powers that the new Erdogan-led presidential government, elected this summer, is seeking through an act of Parliament.
The new powers under a proposed counterterrorism legislation, will give more authority to the government to detain and charge people and sack state workers considered as a threat.
President Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) believes that the government needs new powers to pull Turkey out of its troubled phase that began with July 15, 2016 aborted coup.
“They [the draft law’s regulations] are all limited to a three-year period. Not all of them are in the shadow of the state of emergency, there are some regulations that reflect the continuation of democracy,” AKP MP Bulent Turan, said this week.
National Election Campaign Banner for PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan – Justice and Development Party – Gaziantep – Turkey – 01 Credit: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada /Wikimedia Commons
The AKP particularly says Turkey should guard against the movement of Turkish cleric Fehullah Gulen, who has been living in the United States in self-exile, and accuses of being behind the coup. Gulen, a former colleague of Erdogan, has denied he orchestrated the coup.
The AKP also cites a threat from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has for long launched a militant campaign against Ankara.
But Opposition politicians say the bill will effectively make no change in terms of the government’s ability to act in an authoritarian style against its opponents.
“With this bill, with the measures in this text, the state of emergency will not be extended for three months, but for three years,” Ozgur Ozel, who heads the parliamentary group of the People’s Republican Party, the largest opposition group, said.
“They make it look like they are lifting the emergency but in fact they are continuing it,” Ozel added in remarks to reporters Wednesday, as cited by a Los Angeles Times report.
Estimates vary about the number of people the Erdogan government moved against after the coup but an article in The Middle East Institute says during the two years Ankara sacked 125,806 people from public institutions, the army and the police, detained more than 50,000 people and cancelled passports of nearly 200,000 people.
Human rights organizations and Western countries have criticized Ankara’s crackdown, seeing it as a setback to democracy. Meanwhile, the U.S.-Turkey relations have soured in some areas including differences over American military cooperation with the Kurdish YPG fighters in the Syrian civil war. Turkey sees YPG as backers of PKK.
In the midst of geopolitical competition, Turkey remains a key strategic country for major powers but a majority of Turks and opposition parties have been demanding return of democratic freedoms and rights, set back by the 2016 coup and the Turkish government’s retaliatory moves.
