Author: Zaman Australia

Kahraman Sezer, 44, the former chief superintendent of the national police imprisoned on terrorism-related charges due to his alleged links to the Gülen movement, died on January 30 in the southern city of İskenderun due to complications arising from COVID-19, Turkish media reported.

Sezer was dismissed from the Turkish National Police by a government decree in the aftermath of a coup attempt in July 2016. He was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment by the Diyarbakır 8th High Criminal Court on March 23, 2018 for “membership in a terrorist organization” and had been held in İskenderun Prison for the last four-and-a-half years.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, a faith-based group inspired by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013, which implicated then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, his family members and his inner circle.

Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. Erdoğan intensified the crackdown on the movement following a coup attempt on July 15, 2016 that he accused Gülen of masterminding.

In a tweet human rights defender and Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu said Sezer’s wife had been unable to visit the former police chief for a year and half due to financial problems, noting the situation of purge victims.

Following the abortive putsch, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. More than 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as 20,610 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.

Former public servants were not only fired from their jobs; they were also banned from working again in the public sector and getting a passport. The government also made it difficult for them to work formally in the private sector. Notes were put on the social security database about dismissed public servants to deter potential employers.

In August, another former police officer, Mustafa Kabakçıoğlu, was found dead in a quarantine cell in a prison in the Black Sea city of Gümüşhane after spending nine days in quarantine due to COVID-19.

Twelve-year-old Hakan Dağdeviren, whose parents were arrested on politically motivated terrorism charges, was diagnosed with leukemia last week, leading to calls from human rights activists for the release of his parents, Bold Medya reported.

The young boy was fatigued and exhibiting rashes a couple of weeks ago and was taken to the hospital. He was diagnosed with leukemia and was informed that cancer had metastasized to his liver, abdomen, neck, and armpits. According to his grandparents, Hakan’s morale was very low and he had been suffering from psychological problems since his parents’ arrest.

Hakan’s parents, Sabriye and Gökhan Dağdeviren, were arrested two years ago for alleged links to the Gülen movement. His mother, Sabriye Dağdeviren, was sentenced to six years, 10 months in prison and his father, Gökhan Dağdeviren, was sentenced to 19 years. Both are serving time in Eskisehir Prison, while Hakan and his sister Halenur, are being taken care of by their grandparents.

Grandfather Ali Dağdeviren, 70, was also arrested on similar charges despite suffering from multiple health conditions. He was sentenced to six years, 10 months in prison and was released pending trial. However, he will be rearrested if the Supreme Court of Appeals upholds his sentence.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, a faith-based group inspired by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013, which implicated then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, his family members, and his inner circle.

Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He locked up thousands including many prosecutors, judges, and police officers involved in the investigation as well as journalists who reported on them.

Grandmother Meral Dağdeviren said the ordeals had been traumatic for the whole family. “My grandson needs his parents, especially his mother. He already suffered enough during their arrest, and he needs to get through this illness with the help of his parents,” she said.

Meral Dağdeviren added that they had not been able to tell the parents about their son’s diagnosis. “We could not bring ourselves to tell them, how can we? We could only tell them that he was sick, but not the final diagnosis,” she said.

Following a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and launched a massive crackdown on followers of the Gülen movement under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. According to a statement from Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu on Nov. 26, a total of 292,000 people have been detained while 96,000 others have been jailed due to alleged links to the Gülen movement. Fethullah Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the abortive coup or any terrorist activity.

Turkey’s post-coup purge has taken a huge toll on human life, making no exceptions for children. Several children such as Ahmet Burhan Ataç, Mehmet Fatih Dedeoğlu, Selman Çalışkan, Eymen Küçükaydoğan, Ali Ihsan Başer, and Furkan Dizdar were diagnosed with cancer after their fathers were arrested. Some of these children were unable to cling to life and succumbed to their illnesses. According to the doctors, their fragile bodies were not able to process the sorrow and affliction caused by the persecution of their fathers.

According to a regulation on the execution of sentences, the sentences of prisoners whose first-degree relatives are seriously ill may be postponed for one year. But the authorities refuse to apply this regulation when it comes to Gülen followers. stockholmcf.org/

“During my 10 days in detention, I could hear the screams of other detainees who were being tortured,” said Servet Erdil when talking about the brutal torture and inhumane treatment he witnessed at Ankara police headquarters.

Speaking to journalist Basri Doğan from TR7/24, Erdil, a former bureaucrat, said he was torn between horror and pity because he knew he could be next in line for torture. He added that conditions in detention were dismal and that they were 19 people in a small room for 10 days.

Erdil said there was a woman who had just given birth in detention who was separated from her baby. He said the woman would lactate into a plastic bottle and send the milk to her infant. Erdil added that the woman fainted a few times in the corridor and that they would watch her as she passed by to make sure she was alright.

Erdil was working for the Ministry of Justice when he was detained in December 2016 for alleged links to the Gülen movement. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, a faith-based group inspired by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013, which implicated then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, his family members, and his inner circle.

Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members.

Erdoğan intensified the crackdown on the movement following a coup attempt on July 15, 2016 that he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the abortive putsch or any terrorist activity.

Erdil claimed that during detention he was pressured into “giving up names” of other people in the movement and invoking the effective remorse law. He said they were told that if they wanted to be released, they needed to provide names.

“Normally before court, you are questioned by the prosecutor. However, we never even saw the prosecutor,” said Erdil. “The only people who were taken to the prosecutor were those who wanted to invoke the effective remorse law.”

Upon being arrested, Erdil said they were taken to a room with 70 men in Ankara’s Sincan Prison, notorious for its high number of political prisoners, and they were told to stand still. He said they were left there for a day and that he could not breathe for lack of air. The next day he was subjected to a strip-search. He said he was later given some sort of an apron and made to walk across the prison complex in plain view of the others.

“I have never felt more humiliated in my entire life,” Erdil said. “I felt as if I were violated and dehumanized at that moment.”

According to Erdil he stayed in a cramped prison ward with 30 other men. He said he lost 17 kilograms in 15 months because the food was inedible.

After being released pending trial, Erdil said he could not continue living in Turkey because life had become unbearable. He said his bank cards had been canceled, his account had been frozen and he had to check in with the local police station every week. “They [authorities] left us in a state of nothingness,” he said.

Erdil and his family decided to leave the country and are currently refugees in the Netherlands. The number of Turkish asylum seekers has skyrocketed in the recent past due to a dramatic increase in the number of gross human rights violations committed by the Turkish government.

Following the abortive putsch, the government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as 20,610 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.

Former public servants were not only fired from their jobs; they were also banned from working again in the public sector and getting a passport. The government also made it difficult for them to work formally in the private sector. Notes were put on the social security database about dismissed public servants to deter potential employers.

New analysis has found that New Zealand has handled the coronavirus pandemic more effectively than any other country in the world.

Australian think tank the Lowy Institute has crunched reams of data to produce a new interactive that assesses the coronavirus response of almost 100 nations.

Researchers tracked COVID-19 case numbers in each country, as well as confirmed deaths and testing rates.

While New Zealand took top spot, it was closely followed by Vietnam, Taiwan and Thailand, which were ranked second, third and fourth, respectively.

Australia also performed strongly and was ranked eighth in the world by the Lowy Institute.

The United States has been ravaged by the pandemic and languishes near the bottom of the table, at number 94. Indonesia and India did not perform much better, sitting at numbers 85 and 86, respectively.

Lowy did not rate China’s response to the pandemic, citing a lack of publicly available testing data.

The Institute’s Herve Lemahieu said the interactive showed that smaller countries had typically tackled COVID-19 more effectively than big countries.

“Countries with populations fewer than 10 million people proved more agile, on average, than the majority of their larger counterparts in handling the health emergency,” he told the ABC’s Coronacast podcast.

Several small countries — including Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland and Latvia — round out the list of top-10 nations.

Mr Lemahieu said the data also disproved the theory that authoritarian regimes had managed the crisis more effectively than democracies.

“Authoritarian regimes, on average, started off better — they were able to mobilise resources faster, and lockdowns came faster,” Mr Lemahieu said.

“But to sustain that over time was more difficult for them.”

In contrast, many democracies initially responded poorly to the pandemic before “improving remarkably” after the first wave.

But some major democratic nations — including the United States and the United Kingdom — then failed to capitalise on that progress because they failed to impose sufficiently strict health measures.

Mr Lemahieu said the countries at the top of the list included liberal democracies, authoritarian and hybrid regimes, but all enjoyed the benefits of effective institutions.

“The dividing line in effective crisis response has not really been about regime type but whether citizens trust their leaders and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state,” Mr Lemahieu said.

“And that seems to favour countries with smaller populations, more cohesive societies and more capable institutions.”

0100200300Days since 100th case1001k10k100k1M10MCumulative known casessince 100th caseAustraliaBrazilChinaIndiaJapanMexicoRussiaSwedenUSS. KoreaNZTaiwanUK

Data sources: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, Our World in Data, The COVID Tracking Project, ABC

He said wealthier countries had typically managed the outbreak more effectively than poorer countries, but then lost their lead by the end of 2020 as infections again surged in places like Europe and North America.

“One of the remarkable findings of this study is that there has been more or less a level playing field between developing and rich countries, because measures needed to stem the virus have been quite low tech,” he said.

But Mr Lemahieu predicted that poorer countries would soon lose ground as they struggled to obtain COVID-19 vaccines for their citizens.

“With the uneven distribution and hoarding of vaccines we may well see rich countries get a decisive upper hand in crisis recovery efforts,” he said.

It is unlikely that relations between Turkey and the United States will improve under the Joe Biden administration, the former U.S. Syria envoy James Jeffrey said on Tuesday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has failed to “seize opportunities’’ and take compromising steps on a number of issues over which former U.S. President Donald Trump offered Turkey concessions, Jeffrey told Deutsche Welle Turkish.

In recent year, relations between the NATO allies have been strained by a string of issues, including Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 air defence system, the threat of sanctions against Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank for evading Iran sanctions and Turkey’s stance against an array of regional players in war-torn Libya, among others.

The former top U.S. envoy for Syria pointed to the Ankara-Washington crisis over the S-400 systemsin particular as a barrier in improving bilateral relations.

“The S-400s are a disaster for  Turkey… Purchasing them was a historic mistake,’’ Jeffrey said, noting that the acquisition cost Ankara the F-35 fighter jet programme.

Turkey acquired the Russian systems in 2019, despite threats of sanctions from the United States, which says the system potentially undermines NATO’s defences.

The purchase prompted the U.S.’ removal of Turkeyfrom the F-35 joint strike fighter programme and Washington last month slapped Turkey with sanctions over the systems.

Trump made multiple attempts to compromise with Erdoğan over the matter, Jeffrey said, but Ankara would not cooperate.

The former U.S. envoy also said Turkey needs to address with Russia its concerns over the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northeastern Syria.

The U.S. failed in convincing Turkey of its stance on the YPG, Jeffrey said, noting that this was something that upset Washington.

The Kurdish-majority YPG militia in Syria has played a vital role in the U.S.-led coalition’s ground operations against the Islamic State (ISIS). But Turkey views the YPG as a PKK offshoot – thus a threat to national security – and has conducted three campaigns into Syria to push the group south from the Turkish-Syrian border region.

During her party’s parliamentary group meeting, İYİ (Good) Party leader Meral Akşener criticized Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its opposition ally, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), for remaining silent about the sufferings of the Uighur Turks in Xinjiang at the hands of China. She said the Turkish government remains a silent spectator of the Chinese aggression towards the Uighurs, while the EU and the US raise their voices against it.

Akşener then allowed a Uighur woman named Nursiman Abduraşid to speak about the tragedies suffered by the Uighur Turks in Xinjiang, which led Turkish TV stations that were broadcasting the meeting live to cut off their broadcasts. The state-run Anadolu news agency and Turkish Parliament TV continued their broadcasts after the Uighur woman finished her speech.

Abduraşid said she has been unable to reach her family in in Xinjiang since June 2017 and had just learned that they were taken to internment camps and then arrested. Abduraşid asked Turkey and the world to take action to end the suffering of the Uighurs.

China’s persecution of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang has escalated in recent years, amounting to what experts have said is cultural genocide. More than 1 million people are thought to have been detained in internment camps, and there is growing evidence of re-education programs, restrictions on religious and cultural beliefs, enforced labor schemes, mass surveillance and forced sterilization of women.

China initially denied the camps existed but now describes them as vocational schools aimed at dampening the allure of Islamist extremism and violence.

Many Uighurs have fled to Turkey to escape persecution. However, Ankara is accused of having grown closer to Beijing in recent years and increasing its assistance in apprehending or interrogating Uighurs who Chinese authorities have accused of terrorism. While it refuses to return Uighurs to China directly, Turkey has been accused of sending them to a third country, like Tajikistan, where extradition to China is easier.

The family of Murat Tekin, who was killed by a mob on the Bosporus Bridge on the night of a 2016 failed coup in Turkey, has been ordered by a court to pay compensation to the state for damages to public property, Turkish Minute reported, citing Tekin’s sister.

Murat Tekin, 25, was one of a group of cadets who were deployed to the Bosporus Bridge in İstanbul on the night of the coup attempt, which claimed the lives of 250 people and was suppressed overnight. His sister, Mehtap, has claimed his throat was slashed by an angry mob, backing up her allegation with an autopsy report that stated his body exhibited injuries caused by sharp objects.

His family was unable to claim Tekin’s body until 12 days after the coup attempt.

On Sunday Mehtap Tekin, who has been seeking justice for her brother for four years, announced on Twitter that her family is again in difficulty due to compensation demanded by the state for damage to public property caused by her brother on the night of the coup. The sister said the family’s automobile had been seized by the state.

Mehtap Tekin said while the perpetrators of the murder of her brother go unpunished and that it is they who should be demanding compensation from the state, the state is seeking compensation from them.

Biz kardeşimi devletin askeri okuluna devlete emanet ettik!Sahip çıkacağız dediniz.Katledenlerin Yargılanmasını reddettiniz. Cesedine işkence edenlere sesiniz çıkmadı.Devlet malına zarar vermekten tazminat ödememizi istiyorsunuz15 temmuzda kardeşim mi mala zarar verdi!

— Şehit Murat Tekin (@Harbiyeli_Murat) January 24, 2021

“You massacred my brother with knives, you denigrated his dead body, his memory. Are you now demanding compensation from us, and even with interest?” tweeted Mehtap Tekin.

“You took the life of my brother. What more do you want? Let us live with our pain,” she added.

Military cadets who were taken to the Bosporus Bridge on the night of the coup attempt claim they did not have any idea about the coup unfolding as their superiors told them there was a terrorist attack on the bridge. Many of these cadets have been behind bars since the abortive putsch and have been given life sentences on coup charges.

In a unanimous decision, Turkey’s Constitutional Court in November found a government decree that granted immunity to civilians who were involved in criminal activities to suppress a military coup attempt in 2016 to be constitutional.