Turkey expands purge of media, civil servants

Decrees tighten anti-terrorism laws

Supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party protest during an attempted march that was dispersed by police Sunday in Turkey’s capital, Ankara.
Supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party protest during an attempted march that was dispersed by police Sunday in Turkey’s capital, Ankara.

ISTANBUL -- Turkey shut down 15 news outlets, dismissed more than 10,000 civil servants and tightened its anti-terrorism laws over the weekend in an expansion of its crackdown after the July 15 coup attempt.

photo

AP

A Turkish police officer fires tear gas toward supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party as they tried to march Sunday in Istanbul. The protesters were trying to demonstrate against the detentions of two leading politicians, Diyarbakir Mayor Gultan Kisanak and co-Mayor Firat Anli, in the largest city in the country’s mainly-Kurdish southeast.

The decrees, enacted Saturday, also instituted changes in due process and university administration.

Turkey declared a state of emergency soon after the coup attempt, allowing the government to rule by decree with limited parliamentary involvement. Such decrees have been used to suspend or dismiss more than 100,000 people from the public sector over suspected links to what the government calls terror organizations.

The latest dismissals include 2,534 personnel from the Justice Ministry, 2,219 from the Education Ministry, 2,774 from the Health Ministry, 1,267 from higher education institutions and 101 from the armed forces. Another 1,236 were dismissed across several different government departments and agencies.

The decree also reinstated 39 military members, including a general and an admiral, as well as 35 other civil servants who had been dismissed in earlier decrees.

The purges are intended to eradicate a network, linked to U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, that Turkey accuses of orchestrating the attempted coup. Gulen denies any involvement.

Human-rights groups and Turkey's main opposition party have accused the government of using emergency powers to clamp down on other dissenting voices, including Kurdish and left-leaning individuals and media outlets.

The 15 news outlets closed in Saturday's decree were mostly pro-Kurd and located in the country's southeast, near Syria and Iraq. They include newspapers, magazines, radio and television channels as well as the Dicle News Agency. All were accused of links to terror.

Universal Culture, a 25-year-old monthly art, culture and literature magazine, condemned its closure in a statement: "There are many signatures under the closure decree. We are certain not a single one has read a single one of [Universal Culture's] 299 issues."

The statement ended by saying, "we will not be silent, you don't be silent either."

According to the latest figures by the Turkish Journalists' Association, the latest round of closures brings the total number of outlets shut down to 170. In addition, 105 journalists have been imprisoned. More than 700 press credentials have been revoked, and a third of the media is currently unemployed.

The latest decrees also allow Turkish government prosecutors to record conversations between people convicted of terrorism and their lawyers, seize the audio tapes and limit attorney-client communication.

The state-run Anadolu news agency said Turkish Bar Association President Metin Feyzioglu was critical of the decision to restrict terror suspects' access to lawyers.

The latest decrees also abolished elections for university presidents, who will now be directly chosen by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from among three candidates presented by Turkey's Council of Higher Education.

The Anadolu Agency reported that Lale Karabiyik, deputy chairman of the opposition Republican People's Party, condemned the decrees on Sunday.

"Everything is between one man's lips," Karabiyik said. "They are dragging us to a one-man regime as a fait accompli. This is nothing more than abusing the state of emergency."

The government earlier this month extended the 90-day state of emergency for another 90 days. Erdogan hinted earlier that it could be extended to more than a year.

Information for this article was contributed by Cinar Kiper of The Associated Press and Tugce Ozsoy of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 10/31/2016

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