Turkey suspends more than 15,000 education workers in widening purge
ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey suspended more than 15,000 Education Ministry workers on Tuesday and demanded resignations from all university deans as authorities widened their far-reaching crackdowns in the wake of a failed coup attempt.
The 15,200 personnel were being investigated for links to the power grab launched last week, the ministry said in a statement. In addition, 1,577 university deans from Turkey's public and private universities were asked to hand in their notice. A further 492 staff were removed from duty at the country's top Islamic authority.
It marked an escalation in a purge of state institutions after a mutinous faction of Turkey’s military staged an attempted overthrow on Friday night, hijacking fighter jets and helicopters to strike key installations and security forces.
Tens of thousands of military officials, police, judges, governors and civil servants have been fired, detained or put under scrutiny — accused of having links to Fethullah Gulen, a cleric living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, who Turkey accuses of being behind the plot.
[Turkey’s post-crisis crackdown widens]
Gunship fires on vehicle and tank threatens civilians in CCTV footage of Turkey coup
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The Turkish government has released security footage showing attacks on government supporters and forces during the attempted coup. (Reuters)
Gulen — whose backers operate schools in Turkey, the United States and elsewhere — has denied the claims. Critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have warned that he is using it as an opportunity to stamp out any opposition to his government.
Meanwhile, the United States and Europe have urged NATO-ally Turkey to follow the rule of law and maintain democratic principles amid the sweeping fallout from the coup attempt.
But Turkish leaders showed no signs of easing up. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Tuesday that Turkey aims to remove Gulen’s movement "by its roots." Gulen was once a close ally of Erdogan, but the men are now rivals.
Yildirim said that Turkey had formally requested Gulen’s extradition, saying his role in the events of last week was “clear.”
“However, we will provide them with a pile of evidence,” he added, according to the state-run Anadolu agency.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry has said previously that the United States would be open to such a request, but that Turkey must provide evidence that meets U.S. legal standards. The State Department had no further comment Tuesday despite repeated requests from journalists.
Any disagreement over an extradition has the potential to put the United States on a diplomatic collision course with Turkey, which is a critical partner in efforts to defeat the Islamic State.
Erdogan has already publicly appealed to President Obama to extradite Gulen, whom he accuses of running a terrorist organization.
[Opinion: New blows to U.S.-Turkey ties]
Some 278 people remanded in custody on Tuesday have been charged with crimes including being “members of an armed terrorist organization” and carrying out a “crime against government,” Turkey’s state Anadolu news agency reported. Such charges could bring life sentences.
Those jailed pending trial include Gen. Akin Ozturk, accused of being a leader of the plot to seize power and Gen. Adem Huduti, commander of Turkey’s 2nd Army, which is responsible for countering outside threats from neighboring Syria. Ozturk denies directing the coup.
Erdogan’s air force adviser, Lt. Col. Erkan Kivrak, has been detained at a hotel in the Serik district of Turkey’s southern province of Antalya, Anadolu reported on Tuesday.
[Kerry urges Turkey to guard democratic principles post-coup]
About 35,000 bureaucrats and others have been fired, detained or suspended. The total includes nearly 9,000 Interior Ministry personnel suspended Monday. Annual leave for more than 3 million civil servants has been canceled.
Earlier Tuesday, the Turkish military said it had received intelligence that a rogue element was embarking on a coup hours before hijacked tanks were deployed to the streets and rebel-piloted F-16s bombed key buildings in the capital. The timetable raised questions about why quicker action was not taken to interrupt the plot.
The military said in a statement that it was given information on the coup plot by the National Intelligence Organization at 4 p.m. local time and informed relevant authorities. That was several hours before bridges in Istanbul were cut in one of the first public signs that a power grab was underway.
[Coups in the age of social media]
After the intelligence was received, orders were given for all military aircraft to be grounded and for vehicles — particularly tanks and armored vehicles — to be prevented from leaving an armored unit training school in Etimesgut in a western district of Ankara, the capital, it said.
Still, several hijacked F-16s still managed to take off at around 10 p.m. that evening, bombing the parliament building and police bases. Rebel pilots of two F-16s also “harassed” Erdogan’s plane as he flew back from the coastal resort of Marmaris to Istanbul as the coup was underway, according to the Reuters news agency.
Their radars locked onto the presidential plane but the pilots did not fire, the news agency said citing a former military officer.
Erdogan and his supporters now say that they face an unprecedented threat and that the campaign to root out traitors is necessary to restore the rule of law. But the sheer 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 ever more authoritarian rule.
The U.N. human rights chief on Tuesday praised Turks who “bravely took to the streets” to resist the attempt at a military takeover, but raised concerns about crackdowns on the Turkish judiciary and calls for the death penalty to be reinstated. Such moves are “a big step in the wrong direction,” said a statement by Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
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.
In an interview with CNN, Erdogan said he was with his family in the coastal resort of Marmaris when the fast-moving events began on Friday. Two of his bodyguards were killed in an operation against him, he said, adding that “if I had stayed 10 or 15 additional minutes there, I would have been killed or I would have been taken.”
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.”
Such comments have alarmed European leaders who have attempted to forge better relations with Turkey in the past year, as both sides deal with a mammoth refugee 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,” Hahn said, according to Reuters. “Which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage.”
Hugh Naylor, Zeynep Karatas and Erin Cunningham in Istanbul, Carol Morello in London and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.
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