This weekend Turkey celebrated their national founding holiday of Republic Day, as the govt. continues to relentlessly snuff out any critical or opposing public voices. Over 110,000 people have been forced out of their jobs by executive order without due process. There are now 30 daily newspapers in the country and only 3 are not govt run or controlled, and the most important and largest (Cumhuriyet) was raided today with many journalists, editors, and even lawyers detained and their homes searched. And take a look at the new decrees going into action this weekend, which contravene both their own and international law: All of this justified under their drive to root out all the coup supporters, as they have labelled anyone associated with the exiled Gulen.
The ruling party is in the process of rewriting their constitution to give more power to the executive branch and create an executive President role. I think by now there is no question Erdoğan has showed us how he intends to use that new executive power.
A government proposal to quash the convictions of men convicted of child sex assaults if they marry their victim has sparked furious debate in Turkey, with critics accusing it of encouraging child rape and the ruling party insisting it will protect those who were too young to marry legally.
Thursday’s motion stated that in the case of sexual abuse of a minor committed before November 11, if the act was committed without “force, threat, or any other restriction on consent” and if the aggressor “marries the victim” the sentence will be postponed.
The motion was issued as part of a 49-article bill draft in a night-time parliamentary session. The motion passed, but the bill did not receive a majority vote.
The parliament will vote again on the entire bill on November 22, and if it passes, then the motion will also be validated. If this happens, it will then go to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and following his approval, it will be published in the official gazette and come in to force.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court annulled legislation that prohibits all sexual acts with minors under the age of 15 as sexual abuse. The Court’s ruling caused outrage among rights activists and academics. A study conducted by researchers at Gaziantep University revealed that one in every three marriages in Turkey is a child marriage.
Child abuse figures are up 700% over the last decade. Violence against women up 40%.
Apparently you can just put your opposition in jail, and they can’t fight back. After more than a years worth of punishing the Kurdish areas in the southeast of the country with military bombardment, and denial of services and utilities, they have started to simply jail and replace their leaders. At this time 34 out of 106 elected Kurdish parties’ municipal leaders have been arrested, and the governing party has appointed trustees to do their jobs. The national party co-chars have also been in jail for 2 weeks now with no formal charges, and the lawyer who went to meet with them was arrested also.
But the big news today is the new law just passed, which says that men who rape underage girls will not be charged with a crime if they marry her. You see, it isn’t about the rights of the girl, it’s about her value as a marriage token to her family.
Turkey has been the foremost jailer of journalists for several years over the last decade, something I believe I pointed out on this message board a few years ago.
The EU had been promising Turkey the carrot for what…15 years? but one of the key requirements was to remove any chance of a military coup ever happening again. The EU gave added legitimacy for Erdogan/AKP’s efforts in dismantling the secular military check on populist religious fundamentalism. Here we are.
Erdogan is hypocritical and will suck up to anyone who doesn’t object to his tyranny. Trump is hypocritical and used Muslims as a battle-cry for his racist supporters. Neither cares even slightly about policy or principle except as lies to tell their own people. So they will get along just fine.
They’re both authoritarians, I bet they’ll get along swimmingly. Instead of criticism and censure over the jailing of journalists, I get the feeling Trump’s response will be “Hey, we should do that here! That Erdogan guy’s got it figured out”.
Which fits with what he and others in his “administration” have stated with regards to libel laws (goodbye New York Times) and how they are “making a list” of people who have said ‘bad things’ about them.
The blasts occurred a couple hours after a game had been played at Besiktas stadium. I’m guessing the riot police were around for crowd control following the match?
Aaaand they’ve begun arresting (more) members of the pro-kurdish party HDP.
Guess they didn’t get rid of all of them in the June (?) Purge, so it is time for Phase 2.
Of the 4 largest parties, the HDP was clearly in RTE’s sights for the last year (and their party chairs are in solitary confinement in prison without charges for a month now). But the nationalist MHP has chosen to stick on the government’s side and support the new constitution with an expanded presidential role. That just leaves one major opposition party, the secular left CHP.
So today, a CHP social media expert was detained for one of his tweets about the blasts. And an AKP deputy and (RTE’s speechwriter) wrote a newspaper column in which he listed the CHP as a terrorist organization, because of their opposition to the govt, which essentially provides “political logistics” to terrorism. Literally any group which does not take their marching orders from the top of the AK party is a ‘terrorist group’ in Turkey now; other political parties, the media, corporations, etc. The column directly calls out the broad categories of media and journalists, writers, academics, intellectuals and artists as such.
The Turkish economy is really starting to struggle, with loss of mfg, exports, and tourism. RTE recently called on institutions and citizens to keep their money in Turkish Lira, instead of USD or gold, which is a sign of how the currency is suffering, recently hitting a new high of over 3.5 Lira/USD.