Turkey widens purge after coup try

Bureaucrats fired or held hit 20,000; all detentions top 7,500

A Turkish police special forces vehicle arrives Monday in Ankara. The provincial governor’s office said a military officer was detained in the city after he fatally shot the driver of a vehicle that he hijacked.
A Turkish police special forces vehicle arrives Monday in Ankara. The provincial governor’s office said a military officer was detained in the city after he fatally shot the driver of a vehicle that he hijacked.

ISTANBUL -- Turkish authorities have expanded a crackdown on military officials to include police, judges, governors and millions of civil servants in a purge of opponents after a failed coup.

photo

AP

A Turkish honor guard holds a portrait of a policeman Monday at a mass funeral in Ankara for those killed Friday during the failed military coup.

The Interior Ministry's move Monday to suspend nearly 9,000 employees raised the number of bureaucrats sacked or detained to nearly 20,000. Also Monday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim suspended annual leave for more than 3 million civil servants. More than 7,500 people have been detained.

Also Monday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan extended an order for fighter jets to patrol the airspace over Istanbul and Ankara and banned military helicopters from taking off in Istanbul.

Early today, Erdogan said he's ready to reinstate the death penalty if the Turkish people demand it and the parliament approves the necessary legislation. European Union officials say talks on Turkey's bid to join the EU will end if Ankara restores the death penalty.

"Today, is there no capital punishment in America? In Russia? In China? In countries around the world? Only in European Union countries is there no capital punishment," Erdogan said.

A mutinous faction of Turkey's military staged the attempted coup Friday night, hijacking fighter jets and helicopters to strike key installations and security forces. Raids also were launched to capture or kill Erdogan, as well as kidnap the chief of the armed forces.

Erdogan told CNN on Monday that he escaped death by only a few minutes before coup plotters stormed the resort in southwest Turkey where he was vacationing when the coup attempt unfolded.

He said soldiers supporting the coup killed two of his bodyguards when they stormed the resort early Saturday.

"Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken," he said.

Erdogan and his supporters now say they face an unprecedented threat and that the campaign to root out traitors is necessary to restore the rule of law. But the scale of the purge in the days since the thwarted coup has alarmed Turkey's allies in the West and raised fears that the NATO member is on a slide toward authoritarian rule.

"We are seeing a movement towards more authoritarianism" in the wake of the coup, said Marc Pierini, a Turkey expert at the Brussels-based think tank Carnegie Europe.

Erdogan -- who has ruled Turkey for 14 years, including first as prime minister and now as president -- had already grown increasingly authoritarian in what critics say is a quest to consolidate power. He has jailed journalists and opponents and even sidelined rivals within his own party.

His latest push was for Turkey to transform from a parliamentary to a presidential system, a move that would place even more power in the chief executive's hands.

This "is a dangerous moment for Turkey," Pierini said of the attempted coup's aftermath. "There are quite a few disturbing things happening."

Human rights

Rights advocates warned Monday that the swift roundup of so many bureaucrats indicated the arrests were based on little to no evidence. Such a vast detention or expulsion of employees at key state institutions may encourage rather than prevent more instability, they said.

Some law enforcement officers working at police stations in the capital, Ankara, spoke of the inhumane treatment of detainees in their custody. Many of those held were not documented nor were their identifies verified, the police said. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from superiors.

Amnesty International also urged the Turkish government to respect human rights, amid reports "that detainees in Ankara and Istanbul have been subjected to a series of abuses," the rights group said.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said the government "has the complete right to hold to account those involved in the coup."

But "the speed and scale of the arrests, including of top judges, suggests a purge rather than a process based on evidence," Hugh Williamson, the group's Europe and Central Asia director, said in a statement.

Indeed, Turkish authorities have yet to make public evidence linking the thousands of people detained directly to the coup.

The government has accused supporters of Islamic preacher and Erdogan's archrival, Fethullah Gulen, of orchestrating and carrying out the attempted coup.

Gulen lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, but Erdogan loyalists have long accused Gulen's followers of infiltrating state institutions.

Erodgan and Yildirim both called on the United States to extradite Gulen to Turkey. But in statements to the news media, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said explicitly that the United States wants evidence, not allegations, of the involvement of Gulen before authorities approve an extradition. Turkey's government has not yet completed a formal request to extradite the reclusive cleric.

Yildirim suggested to reporters in Ankara that the U.S. request was not reasonable.

"We would be disappointed if our friends told us to present proof, even though members of the assassin organization are trying to destroy an elected government under the directions of that person," Yildirim said. "At this stage, there could even be a questioning of our friendship."

The U.S. ambassador to Turkey, John Bass, said in a statement released Monday that speculation by some public figures that the U.S. in some way supported the coup was "categorically untrue."

"Such speculation is harmful to the decades-long friendship between two great nations," Bass said. "We have been clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting their investigation into the coup attempt."

Still, a senior Turkish official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that there had been "an ongoing inquiry into the Gulen movement's penetration of law enforcement, the judiciary, and the military."

Known members of the movement within the military "had been under investigation for some time," the official said. "There was a list of people who were suspected of conspiring to stage a coup."

European views

Acknowledgments of such investigations have alarmed European leaders who have attempted to forge better relations with Turkey in the past year, as both sides deal with a migrant crisis stemming from Syria and Iraq.

"It looks at least as if something has been prepared" before ordering the arrest of so many public officials, said Johannes Hahn, the European Union commissioner responsible for handling Turkey's membership bid.

"The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage," Hahn added, according to the Reuters news agency.

Speaking in Brussels, where the EU and NATO are based, Kerry said that the Western military alliance would scrutinize Turkey in the coming days to ensure that it adheres to the bloc's criteria for democracy and the rule of law.

The international community, including NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, has made clear that it stands behind Turkey's elected government.

But "the fact that an attempted coup has taken place has profoundly shaken the confidence of many in Turkey," said Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a joint news conference with Kerry that the bloc will be "extremely vigilant" in ensuring Turkey does not stray from upholding fundamental human rights and the rule of law.

New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who recently led a winning campaign to persuade U.K. voters to leave the European Union, said the referendum's outcome last month "in no sense means we are leaving Europe."

"We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European cooperation and participation of all kinds," Johnson said before the start of an EU foreign ministers' meeting. He said that last week's attack in Nice, France, showed the need for European countries to coordinate their response to terrorism, and that he would support the EU's call for "restraint and moderation" in Turkey after the failed coup.

For the fourth night in a row, hundreds took to public squares in major cities, including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, in a fresh show of support for the government. They waved Turkish flags, shouted pro-government slogans and sang praise of Erdogan.

Information for this article was contributed by Erin Cunningham, Hugh Naylor, Zeynep Karatas and Loveday Morris of The Washington Post; by John-Thor Dahlburg, Suzan Fraser, Dominique Soguel, Desmond Butler, Bradley Klapper and Kirsten Grieshaber of The Associated Press; and by Ceylan Yeginsu of The New York Times.

A Section on 07/19/2016

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