One year ago, on the night of the 15th of July, Turkey was confronted with a coup d’etat attempt. A small group of armed forces tried to remove president Recep Tayyip Erdogan from office, but they miserably failed in their attempt largely because of poor planning (some soldiers believed it was a military exercise instead of a coup) and a low participation rate (the chief of staff claims that only 1.5% of the Turkish army, most of them privates, were involved). Mr. Erdogan, who came to power in 2003, was quick to blame his archenemy, Fethullah Gülen, an U.S.-based moderate Muslim cleric and erstwhile ally of the Turkish president and his AK Party. Some 150,000 “Gülenists”, people suspected of being sympathetic to Gülen’s ideas (known as the Hizmet movement), were purged from civil service whereas many small businesses were confiscated and transferred to AK loyalists. About 50,000 people are in jail. As we said in our blog “Coping with a Coup”, it is unlikely that Gülen was behind the coup (although some of his followers may have participated). Anyhow, Erdogan persists in requesting U.S. authorities to extradite Gülen to Turkey even though he so far only offered flimsy evidence at best.

My word is your bond…

Erdogan’s government commemorated the year-old coup event by unveiling monuments, dedicated to the 250 martyrs who died by resisting the coup, that have been erected opposite Erdogan’s opulent palace in Ankara and another close to the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul. In a ceremony in parliament, Erdogan stated that he would approve the re-instatement of the death penalty if  parliament proposed it, allowing for an effective punishment of the Gülenist “traitors”. To top off the festivities, Turkish authorities also sacked another 7,400 civil servants this week and jailed several lawyers and human rights activists, including the chairman and the director of Amnesty International in Turkey. Never mind that it was Amnesty International which in 1998 came to Mr. Erdogan’s rescue when as mayor of Istanbul he was jailed after reading out a religiously themed poem. The human rights group launched an international campaign and successfully appealed to the government to release this “prisoner of conscience”. Well, times have changed. In today’s Turkey dissidents are not able to speak their mind.

Erdogan aims to politically exploit the failed coup by sending ministers to various European countries, including the Netherlands, to address the Turkish diaspora in these countries to commemorate the anniversary of the failed coup and drum up support for him in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2019. Dutch (demissionary) prime minister Mark Rutte, who has the spine of a worm when confronted with right-wing populism at home, denied a visa to Turkish deputy prime minister Tugrul Türkes to attend an event and address Turkish-Dutch citizens in the city of Apeldoorn, citing disturbed diplomatic relations between the two countries. This is the wrong response. In a free, democratic society anybody, also foreign visitors, should be able to deliver a speech within the boundaries of the law (i.e. one is not allowed to incite violence or discriminate against certain groups of people). It should be possible for a foreign minister to address his flock in the Netherlands or in any other democratic nation for that matter. Denying this right to an official of a democratically elected government only offers support to Erdogan’s many conspiracy theories (e.g. that the West was behind the coup). A better response would have been to send a (possibly Turkish-speaking) politician to Istanbul to address AK supporters, exposing Erdogan’s shortcomings and emphasizing the value and right of free speech. Maybe worth reminding Turks of Erdogan’s recital of that poem now nearly 20 years ago…