Author: Zaman Australia

Turkish public prosecutor Osman Yarbaş, who was arrested last month on drug-trafficking charges, has been disbarred by the country’s top judicial council, local media reported on Friday.

Following an operation carried out by the Konya Police Department on a network trafficking drugs from Turkey’s southern Adana province to the central Anatolian city of Konya, the police identified Yarbaş as the person running the network through evidence obtained from the phone of a courier, who was also a police officer.

According to a previous report by the NTV news website, the police retrieved WhatsApp messages on the courier’s phone and found that Yarbaş, a public prosecutor overseeing the Adana Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office Terrorism Crimes Investigation Bureau, had given instructions to him about a shipment of drugs.

After he was suspended on May 11 by the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK), which also assigned an inspector to investigate his conduct, Yarbaş was arrested on drug-trafficking charges in June.

Turkish media reports said on Friday the HSK had disbarred the public prosecutor.

After a 2016 coup attempt, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government dismissed 4,156 judges and prosecutors, nearly a third of the total number at the time, which was followed by the mass recruitment of replacements.

Yarbaş was hired as a prosecutor in 2017, after the post-coup purge targeting the judiciary resulted in a shortage of staff.

According to a report by Italian judge Luca Perilli, as of December 2019, at least 45 percent of Turkey’s roughly 21,000 judges and prosecutors had three years of experience or less.

Hakkı Köylü, a lawmaker from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), acknowledged to Reuters in 2020 that some judges and prosecutors “have been appointed without adequate training.”

Critics accuse Erdoğan of recruiting pro-AKP lawyers as judges and prosecutors. On top of that, the mass disbarment of members of the judiciary is believed by many to have had a chilling effect on the entire justice system, intimidating the remaining judges and prosecutors into doing the government’s bidding by launching politically motivated investigations into critics.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would have been left behind by the country’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) if a general election were to have been held in August, according to a survey conducted by the Eurasia Public Research Center (AKAM).

The results of the survey, which is based on face-to-face interviews carried out between July 30 and Aug. 8 on 2,410 people in 26 provinces, were reported Friday by local media.

When asked “Which political party would you vote for if an early election were to be held?” 29.9 percent of respondents said they would vote for the main opposition CHP, while 28.5 percent said they would support the ruling AKP, with undecided voters distributed among the parties.

While the İYİ (Good) Party, an ally of the CHP, would have stood at 13.3 percent in total in an August election, the AKP’s ally, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) would have received 7.1 and 10.5 percent of the vote, respectively.

The poll results further showed that of the smaller parties, the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA) would have garnered 5.1 percent, followed by the Victory Party (ZP) (1.3 percent), the Future Party (GP) (1.2 percent) and the Felicity Party (SP) (1.2 percent), with other parties receiving 1.9 percent of the nationwide vote.

In the last general election held in June 2018, the AKP garnered a nationwide vote of 42.6 percent. However, public surveys have increasingly been showing the party’s public support to be slipping.

The ORC Research Company on Friday released a graph showing the changes in the ruling AKP’s nationwide support in the last year. According to the figures, the party continued to bleed voters, with its support declining from 33.4 percent to as little as 27.3 percent within a year.

While the struggle to sway undecided voters continues between the AKP and the CHP, the Diken news website on Thursday cited members of the ruling party as saying that they would soon come back to the AKP, with the main opposition “resting on its [laurels].”

An AKP lawmaker told Diken that the party’s vote had “recovered” compared to a few months ago as they started “reaping the rewards of being on the field.”

Erdoğan, whose ruling AKP has been in power as a single-party government since 2002, was elected president in 2014 and reelected in 2018. His election in 2018 was under a presidential system as Turkey switched from a parliamentary to a presidential system of governance with a public referendum in 2017. Under the presidential system, Erdoğan is accused of establishing one-man rule, destroying the separation of powers and silencing dissent. Turkishminute

Attacks targeting four Alevi houses of worship (cemevis) and associations in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Saturday were “organized and planned beforehand,” the Gazete Duvar news website reported on Sunday, citing a lawyer representing the institutions.

According to Hüsniye Şimşek, the Türkmen Alevi Bektaşi Foundation’s headquarters in Çankaya was targeted around 1:30 p.m. and the Şah-ı Merdan cultural association in Mamak around 2:30 p.m., while the Ana Fatma Cemevi and the Gökçebel Village Association – both also in Mamak – were attacked simultaneously around 3:40 p.m.

A woman sustained injuries from a knife at the Türkmen Alevi Bektaşi Foundation, local media reports said over the weekend, while plastic chairs were thrown at members of the Şah-ı Merdan cultural association.

Although the police detained a suspect identified only by the initials A.O.K., accusing him of all the attacks in Ankara, others believe the incidents weren’t perpetrated by the same person.

“The person caught on camera at the Ana Fatma Cemevi doesn’t fit the description of the [perpetrator of the attack on] the Türkmen Alevi Bektaşi Foundation, where the first attack took place. … The perpetrator of the first attack was said to be in his 20s, while the person who attacked the other institutions was [said to be] in his 30s,” Şimşek said, adding that they thought the incidents were “organized and planned beforehand.”

Ana Fatma Cemevi President Mustafa Karabudak also said they thought the attacks were organized, underlining that there has to be someone who hired the attacker since there’s no logic to one person perpetrating all the attacks.

Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Ankara deputy Gamze Taşcıer, who visited the Alevi associations and was briefed on the events, said there wasn’t a long time between the attacks, adding that if the attacks were carried out by the same person, the questions of how and by whom this person was provided transportation should be answered.

“Nearly 10 hours elapsed between the first attack and the time he [the attacker] was caught. There is negligence here, but it’s the Interior Ministry that should investigate it,” Taşcıer also said.

According to a 2020 report published by the Freedom of Belief Initiative, which listed data obtained from work monitoring religion or belief-based hate crimes that were committed in Turkey that year, Alevis were targeted in more than half of them.

Alevis, who are estimated to account for 16.5 percent of Turkey’s population of 83 million, are the second-largest Islamic sect in Turkey, with Sunni Hanafi Islam the largest.

There are long-standing tensions between the Alevi and Sunni communities in Turkey. During the Turkish republican era, hundreds of Alevis were killed in pogroms, which many now believe were masterminded by groups inside the state, in the cities of Çorum, Yozgat and Kahramanmaraş in the 1970s.

Thirty-four Alevi intellectuals died in a fire in 1992 at the Madımak Hotel in Sivas. In other incidents, such as in İstanbul’s predominantly Alevi Gazi neighborhood in 1995, Alevis were targeted by individuals armed with machine guns.

Turkey has long denied Alevi demands for state recognition, and cemevis are not officially recognized by the state as houses of worship, hence given no financial assistance.

Turkey’s top appeals court has upheld life sentences handed down to 60 former military cadets who were jailed in the aftermath of a failed coup in July 2016 and convicted on coup charges, according to a platform defending the rights of jailed military cadets.

Three former female air force cadets — Nagihan Yavuz, Nimet Ecem Gönüllü and Şüheda Sena Öğütalan — are among the 60 whose sentences have been upheld. They were convicted in May 2018.

The cadets have denied taking part in the coup attempt and said they were only acting on orders from their superiors, who told them there was a terrorist attack on the night of the attempted coup on July 15, 2016.

Dozens of other military cadets who were sentenced to life on coup charges have been released in recent months for retrial after the Supreme Court of Appeals overturned their sentences. The cadets had been in jail for about six years. The top court’s latest decision on the 60 former cadets has come as a disappointment for those who were awaiting a similar ruling that would have made their release possible.

“The life sentences given to our friends in the Orhanlı trial have been upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeals. Take the cadets into the midst of chaos, open fire on them, then give them life sentences. Damn your justice,” the military cadets committee tweeted on Wednesday.

Orhanlı refers to the trial of military cadets over incidents that took place at the Orhanlı toll booths in the Tuzla neighborhood of İstanbul on the night of the coup attempt.

Immediately after the abortive putsch, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government along with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pinned the blame on the faith-based Gülen movement. The movement strongly denies any involvement.

A documentary telling the stories of military cadets in Turkey, hundreds of whom were unjustly convicted due to their alleged involvement in the failed coup in 2016, premiered on YouTube several days before the sixth anniversary of the coup attempt this month, drawing more than 1 million viewers.

Following the coup attempt, 16,409 military cadets were expelled from their academies by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny, and 355 of them were given life sentences, with some of them overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeals, according to figures revealed at the end of the video. As of July 2022, 209 cadets are still behind bars.

Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals has reversed aggravated life sentences handed down to four people including a former media executive on conviction of attempting to destroy the constitutional order due to their alleged links to the Gülen movement, Deutsche Welle Turkish service reported.

The 3rd criminal chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals has completed its review of appeals filed by the defendants including Hidayet Karaca, former chief executive of the now-defunct Samanyolu Media Group, as part of a case that was launched against 75 people accused of having links to the faith-based movement inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen.

The Turkish government labels the Gülen movement as a terrorist organization and accuses it of masterminding a failed coup in July 2016. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.

In June 2018 the Ankara 4th High Criminal Court handed down aggravated life sentences to Karaca; former lawmaker İlhan İşbilen; Fethullah Gülen’s cousin Kazım Avcı; and Alaeddin Kaya, former owner of the now-defunct Zaman newspaper, on charges of attempting to overturn the constitutional order.

Their aggravated life sentences were upheld by a regional appeals court in November 2020. The defendants subsequently filed an appeal at the Supreme Court of Appeals.

The Supreme Court of Appeals in a ruling dated June 28 decided to annul the aggravated life sentences given to the four suspects on the grounds that they were in jail at the time of the coup attempt and were not involved in it. Yet the top court suggested the maximum punishment for the defendants on charges of terrorist organization membership due to their links to the Gülen movement.

The court also annulled the prison sentences given to the four defendants on charges of fraud and money laundering. Karaca and the other three defendants will be retried at the Ankara 4th High Criminal Court, where they will face charges of terrorist organization membership.

Karaca has been held in the notorious Silivri Prison in İstanbul since Dec. 14, 2014. He has been given prison sentences of various lengths in several trials, which are seen as politically motivated due to his work at a Gülen-linked media outlet.

Turkey’s top appeals court has upheld life sentences handed down to 60 former military cadets who were jailed in the aftermath of a failed coup in July 2016 and convicted on coup charges, according to a platform defending the rights of jailed military cadets.

Three former female air force cadets — Nagihan Yavuz, Nimet Ecem Gönüllü and Şüheda Sena Öğütalan — are among the 60 whose sentences have been upheld. They were convicted in May 2018.

The cadets have denied taking part in the coup attempt and said they were only acting on orders from their superiors, who told them there was a terrorist attack on the night of the attempted coup on July 15, 2016.

Dozens of other military cadets who were sentenced to life on coup charges have been released in recent months for retrial after the Supreme Court of Appeals overturned their sentences. The cadets had been in jail for about six years. The top court’s latest decision on the 60 former cadets has come as a disappointment for those who were awaiting a similar ruling that would have made their release possible.

“The life sentences given to our friends in the Orhanlı trial have been upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeals. Take the cadets into the midst of chaos, open fire on them, then give them life sentences. Damn your justice,” the military cadets committee tweeted on Wednesday.

Orhanlı refers to the trial of military cadets over incidents that took place at the Orhanlı toll booths in the Tuzla neighborhood of İstanbul on the night of the coup attempt.

Immediately after the abortive putsch, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government along with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pinned the blame on the faith-based Gülen movement. The movement strongly denies any involvement.

A documentary telling the stories of military cadets in Turkey, hundreds of whom were unjustly convicted due to their alleged involvement in the failed coup in 2016, premiered on YouTube several days before the sixth anniversary of the coup attempt this month, drawing more than 1 million viewers.

Following the coup attempt, 16,409 military cadets were expelled from their academies by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny, and 355 of them were given life sentences, with some of them overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeals, according to figures revealed at the end of the video. As of July 2022, 209 cadets are still behind bars.