Turkey’s continuing wave of arrests and suspensions of soldiers, police, judges and civil servants, and the credible reports of beatings, torture and even rape of prisoners, represent a deeply worrying attack on the rule of law and democratic values by a European power we have called an ally. One that we had said we wished to join us in the EU. To date more than 60,000 have been targeted and 13,000 arrested, including some 8,831 soldiers.
The response by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the ham-fisted coup attempt on July 15th has all the hallmarks of a tinpot dictator. It became an opportunity to execute a purge which he had clearly been preparing against opponents who, Erdogan claims, belong to a vast foreign-based conspiracy to overthrow him. Evidence of the plot and its alleged instigator, Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, has yet to be produced. The quite proper US refusal to extradite him without proof is taken as evidence of its support for the coup.
After the 1930s-Stalin-style purge, we can now expect the show trials. And a refashioning of the state in Erdogan’s image. He has been granted emergency powers to sign new laws without prior parliamentary approval and to limit rights as he sees fit. Already maximum detention for suspects has been extended from four days to 30, and he has ordered the closure of thousands of private schools, charities and foundations with “links” to Gulen. The gendarmerie and coast guard will now report to the Interior Ministry under political control and no longer to the army.
Nato allies will view with deep concern the virtual decapitation of the high command in the second largest army in the alliance. Some 120 generals, a third of the active list and many of them the most senior, have been detained. There is a striking parallel with Stalin's 1937 army purge when 11 of 13 army commanders and 57 of the 85 corps commanders were removed (although in that case they were shot). No army can withstand such attrition, not least in the face of a growing threat from IS in neighbouring Syria and a renewed insurgency by Kurdish militants.
Polls suggest two thirds of Turks in a country which thrives on conspiracy theories – no doubt in part because conspiracies once did thrive – willingly believe the charges against Gulen, although no-one can explain how a coup with such widespread support failed so miserably, or how the loyal police managed to compile such comprehensive lists of subversives within hours of the coup.
Those who might ask such embarrassing questions, independent journalists, are now also being rounded up and charged or hounded out of jobs. Amnesty International is accused also of being a Gulenist conspiracy. But in a modern Turkey, so integrated into the world community and communications, the truth will out.