Category: World

A newborn baby diagnosed with heart disease was returned along with his mother to a Turkish jail on Saturday despite doctors’ objections, the Aktif Haber news website reported.Yusuf Burak was born in a hospital in the eastern province of Erzurum on Friday to Şeyma Tekin, who had awaited delivery in prison.

The mother has been under arrest since the second month of her pregnancy due to alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement. The government accuses the movement of plotting a July 15, 2016 coup attempt and has carried out a massive crackdown on its followers.

According to Turkish law, it is illegal to imprison pregnant women even if they have been convicted of a crime. Exiled lawyer Nurullah Albayrak told TR724 news that there are over 700 children in Turkey’s prisons along with their mothers in open violation of the law.

The doctors said baby Yusuf was not able develop properly in the jail and objected to his return. The baby’s grandfather called it a massive injustice on Twitter.

Tekin was arrested as a result of an anonymous tip-off to the authorities. She denied any involvement in the coup but was still kept in pre-trial detention just like tens of thousands of other real and alleged sympathizers of the movement.

Ümit Horzum, a former civil servant who was removed from his job at the Turkish Accreditation Agency (TURKAK) by a decree issued during an ongoing state of emergency declared following a failed coup last year, was abducted from his car in Ankara, according to his wife.

In series of tweets from the “Horzum Ailesi” (Horzum family) Twitter account on Wednesday, she said: “I haven’t heard from my husband Ümit Horzum since Wednesday, Dec 6, 2017, 6 pm. … Following media reports on tortured detainees, my husband was scared, and he left home to hide. … A short while after leaving, the gendarmerie came to our house to detain him. … He had not been staying at home since then. A few days ago one of his friends dropped by to say his car was stopped and that he was abducted. [His friend] left without answering any further questions.”

“For an entire week, I have been frequenting every hospital, police station, courtroom and gendarmerie station to find my husband. … The gendarmerie sergeant told me: ‘Stop trying to find him. He is a [terror] group leader who is going to be sentenced to … prison. He is … no good for you’,” she said.

“Some officials say: ‘The government has probably taken him,’ backing up their assumptions with journalist Cem Küçük’s remarks on TV. … I am a mother of two, my children are constantly crying for their father.”

Pro-government columnist and TV commentator Küçük, a staunch supporter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, suggested during a live TV program on Monday that Turkish intelligence should kill family members of jailed followers of the faith-based Gülen movement in order to turn the inmates into operatives for the Erdoğan regime.

11 people reported abducted since 2016 failed coup

Mysterious disappearances involving already-victimized opposition groups have become a common occurrence in Turkey in the aftermath of a July 15, 2016 coup attempt which Erdoğan and ruling the Justice and Development Party (AKP) accuse Gülen movement of masterminding. The movement strongly denies any involvement.

At least 11 people are alleged to have been abducted thus far. Previously, three teachers, a lawyer, a university employee, two intelligence agency officials, an Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTİK) employee and a Competition Authority employee have been reported missing, while one of the teachers was handed over by unidentified men to police after dropping out of sight for 42 days. Also, an Ankara man named Sunay Elmas is reported to have been abducted, but this particular case took place on Jan. 27, 2016.

(Some parts of this story first appeared on TurkeyPurge.com)

Müyesser Yıldız, a columnist for the odatv news website, has claimed that there are at least 400 people in Ankara who are pretending to have been injured in a failed coup attempt in Turkey on July 15, 2016 and are receiving state benefits.

In her last article on Odatv on Thursday, Yıldız said she found out that the Ankara Social Services Provincial Directorate, which is tied to the Ministry of Family and Social Policy, has cancelled the payments of veterans’ benefits of around 400 people.

Since July 15, 2016 there has been widespread speculation that some people who were injured before this date obtained medical reports showing that they were injured during the commotion on the night of July 15. Around 250 people were killed while more than 1,000 others were injured in the coup attempt, which was suppressed overnight.

“This figure is only from Ankara. When we take the cases in other provinces into account, it looks that there are many ‘fake veterans.’ … Two-and-a-half years have passed since July 15, and the state is just now understanding that it has been ‘deceived’,” Yıldız wrote, calling the situation “scandalous.”

In April 2018 it was discovered that Şerife Boz, a woman who reportedly drove to İstanbul’s Taksim Square with a truckload of youths in a bid to join public resistance against the military coup, came to the venue one day after the coup attempt when everything was under control.

Alparslan Cambaz, the son of victim Mustafa Cambaz, announced at the time that families of the victims of July 15 were preparing to sue Boz.

According to Cambaz, Boz did not drive to Taksim on the night of July 15; she just posed for a photo sitting in the driver’s seat, thus producing fake news.

A statement made by Saliha Sultan, the Anadolu news agency photojournalist who took Boz’s picture in Taksim Square, also came as confirmation of Cambaz’s claims.

Sultan tweeted that she took Boz’s photo on July 16, 2016, one day after the coup attempt and that the detail was completely suppressed.

She said she was surprised by Boz’s remarks in the media, which presented the photo as from July 15, but did not mention it to more than a few people.

In the wake of these allegations, Boz claimed that the families of the July 15 victims were jealous of her and that was why they were making such allegations against her.

The Yeni Şafak daily, a staunch supporter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on Friday said that in response to the trial of a Turkish banker in New York, Turkey had launched an investigation into some 30 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in Turkey, claiming they would all be expelled if any links to the faith-based Gülen movement were discovered.

According to the daily, the decision came after the testimony of Hüseyin Korkmaz, a former İstanbul police officer who was arrested by the Erdoğan regime in the aftermath of corruption operations in late 2013, in a New York court where Mehmet Hakan Atilla, an executive of Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank, is being tried for violating US sanctions on Iran.

Korkmaz called Erdoğan the “No. 1” target in a group that also included Mehmet Zafer Çağlayan, the former economy minister, and Süleyman Aslan, a former chief executive at Halkbank, a large Turkish state-owned bank that was central to the sanction-busting scheme.

Korkmaz, who was paid $50,000 by the FBI as part of a witness program, said he brought some evidence of the Dec. 17, 2013 corruption operations in which Turkish-Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab and the inner circle of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and then-Prime Minister Erdoğan were implicated.

Following the testimony of Korkmaz, who left Turkey illegally in 2016 after his release from prison in 2015, the FBI’s legal attaché at the US Embassy in Ankara was summoned to the Ankara Police Department on Wednesday.

According to Yeni Şafak, the role of FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) staff members, who officially number more than 30 in Turkey, and Korkmaz’s illegal departure from Turkey and arrival in the US with a fake passport will all be investigated.

If any links to Korkmaz are identified, the FBI agents will face legal process in accordance with Turkish Penal Code (TCK) Articles 327 and 328 related to the leak of classified state documents. The FBI agents will be expelled, and no other US intelligence officials will be allowed to work in Turkey, the daily claimed.

Turkish human rights activist and philanthropist Osman Kavala underlined in a letter sent from prison that he has spent 15 months in pretrial detention and still has not been indicted.

Kavala said in the letter that appeared in Turkish media outlets on Friday that the fact that he has not once been questioned by a prosecutor and his requests for release have been denied for 19 times indicates a belief among authorities that his pre-trial detention is reasonable.

Despite the lack of any indictment, Kavala is accused in the pro-government media of organizing and financing the anti-government Gezi Park protests of 2013. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan refers to the protests as an attempt to topple his government and publicly accuses Kavala of being among the financiers of the Gezi protests.

Last month, Council of Europe (CoE) Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović  submitted an opinion in a case brought by Kavala against the government of Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

She described the incarceration of Kavala as part of increasing pressure in Turkey on the legitimate activities of human rights activists and civil society organizations.

Kavala was detained in October 2017 and subsequently jailed pending trial, accused of seeking to overthrow the government as part of an investigation into the Gülen network, which Ankara accuses of carrying out a 2016 failed coup.

Former Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy Eren Erdem’s father on Thursday called on his jailed son to halt a hunger strike, the Artı Gerçek news website reported.

Erdem, who has been in pretrial detention for seven months on terrorism charges, on Monday decided to go on a hunger strike to protest his trial.

A CHP deputy on Monday said Erdem had “emptied his refrigerator” and was about to launch a hunger strike that he referred to as “justice fasting,” while his lawyers were trying to talk him out of it.

Erdem was first arrested in June 2018, just five days after he failed to secure a seat in the legislature in the parliamentary elections. Charged with “aiding a terrorist organization,” he faces a prison sentence of between nine and 22 years.

“Think about your son, your mother, those who love you. I would like to reach out to politicians, writers: We have failed to convince our son, please talk him out of it,” his father, Hasan Erdem, said in a video message aired on Halk TV.

The elder Erdem was fired on Jan. 8 after protesting a prosecutor who objected to a decision to release his son.

The former CHP deputy was rearrested after the prosecutor’s objection.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is utilising the massacre in two mosques in New Zealand’s Christchurch as a tool to make political gains ahead of March 31 local election, the Economist said on Thursday.

“Mr Erdogan has used the attack to score political points and whip up his conservative base ahead of local elections in late March,” the website said.

New Zealand was shaken by a horrifying attack on March 15, when fifty people were killed and dozens injured when a gunman opened fire in two mosques during Friday prayers. The Australian gunman, Brenton Tarrant, had uploaded what he said was a manifesto to his social media accounts before live streaming the attack on his Facebook account.

Erdoğan has been blaming the killings on global Islamophobia and has tied the slaying of Muslims in New Zealand to what he said was a global threat to Turkey.

While most news agencies and social media sites have tried their best to remove footage of the attacks that Tarrant live streamed, Erdoğan has shown the footage at rallies ahead of upcoming local elections that were broadcast live to millions of viewers around Turkey.

The Turkish President has accused the West of preparing the Christchurch killer’s online manifesto during his rallies.

“There is a very serious group behind this,” The Economist quoted Erdoğan as saying, “because why does the West keep silent? Why does the Western media keep silent? They found it, they prepared it, and they handed it to him.”

“It is a confrontation Mr Erdogan seems to relish—especially when an election is looming,” The Economist said.

A woman has been detained in the Turkish capital of Ankara on accusations that she provided financial assistance to the families of people who were jailed due to their alleged links to the Gülen movement, Turkish media reported on Wednesday.

The woman, identified as Yasemin Ören and referred as “cosmic sister” by the police, was detained in Ankara on Wednesday as part of investigation carried out by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which issued detention warrants for 37 people who were in touch with Ören.

Ören’s husband as well as 25 others were also detained on Wednesday. Twenty-two of the detainees were women.

The police reportedly seized some jewelry that was said to be wedding gifts owned by the women as well as money found during raids on their houses.

Ören was followed by the police as she travelled from the central province of Tokat to Ankara, where she met with a group of women at a cafeteria, according to a report on the CNN Türk news website.

The woman reportedly used pay phones to communicate with the other women in order to avoid police surveillance.

The Turkish government launched a massive crackdown on alleged or real members of the movement following the coup attempt under the pretext of an anti-coup fight.

On Feb. 14, Turkey’s Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu announced that more than 500,000 people have been detained while 30,000 others were sent to jail over alleged links to the Gülen movement.

In addition, more than 150,000 people were removed from state jobs for the same reason. (Turkishminute.com)

Public broadcaster Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) allocated 10 times more election coverage to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) alliance than other political parties in February, the Cumhuriyet daily reported on Monday.

TRT covered the AKP-MHP election alliance for 53 hours in February while it covered the other political parties, namely the election alliance of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and İYİ (Good) Party, for six hours.

Turkey will hold local elections on March 31.

The TRT attracts widespread criticism for failing to give sufficient coverage to the opposition parties.

Around 70 percent of TRT’s funding comes from a tax levied on electricity bills. Every time a Turkish taxpayer pays an electricity bill, 2 percent of the amount due goes to TRT.

Last July TRT was put under direct control of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is also the AKP’s leader.

Most rallies held by Erdoğan and the AKP are broadcast live by the station during election campaigns.

A Turkish court has banned access to the MedyaBold news outlet’s tweets about kidnapping cases in Turkey, which are allegedly being carried out by the country’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT), MedyaBold reported on Thursday.

There have been many abduction cases in Turkey since a July 15, 2016 failed coup, targeting supporters of the faith-based Gülen movement. The government holds the movement responsible for the abortive putsch and has cracked down on its real and alleged followers. The movement strongly denies any involvement in the attempt.

An Ankara court, based on a demand from the presidency’s Security Affairs Directorate, banned access to 253 MedyaBold tweets in a ruling on Feb.21 due to national security concerns. The tweets focus on the website’s stories about kidnapping cases in Turkey.

Nothing has been heard for month from many people who were kidnapped in black transporter vans by unknown individuals. The families of the kidnapped, who are unable to get any information on the whereabouts of their loved ones from state authorities, are desperately calling for help on social media.