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Chiudi

Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 22 novembre 2011 alle ore 13:58.

My24


CAMBRIDGE – When questioned recently about a constitutional law professor who was arrested for lecturing at an institute run by the country’s main pro-Kurdish political party, Turkey’s interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, couldn’t hide his irritation: I am having a hard time understanding those saying a professor should not be arrested while thousands of other people are being arrested in Turkey.

Presumably, Sahin meant to say that a professor cannot claim special treatment under the law. But his remark inadvertently underscored Turkey’s new reality, in which any perceived opponent of the current regime can be jailed, with or without evidence, for terrorism or other violent acts.

Special courts, tasked with prosecuting terrorism and crimes against the state, have been working overtime to produce charges that are often as absurd as they are baseless. For example, journalists have been imprisoned for producing articles and books at the behest of an alleged terrorist organization called Ergenekon, whose existence has yet to be confirmed, despite years of investigation.

Likewise, military officers have been charged on the basis of blatantly fraudulent – indeed, amateurishly produced – documents containing obvious anachronisms. A senior police commissioner is currently languishing in jail for allegedly collaborating with far-left militants he spent his entire career hunting down. These prosecutions have cast an ever-widening net, ensnaring scores of journalists, authors, and academics, hundreds of military officers, and thousands of Kurdish politicians and activists, among others.

Self-censorship has become routine. Media bosses anxious to retain Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s favor have fired many of those journalists who continue to criticize his regime. And government control now extends beyond the media, judiciary, and academia to the worlds of business and sports. Previously autonomous regulatory bodies (such as the competition authority) have been quietly subordinated to the government, with no debate or discussion.

Even the Turkish Academy of Sciences has been targeted. A recent decree, widely condemned abroad, allows the government to appoint two-thirds of the Academy’s members, thereby ending even the semblance of scientific independence.

Erdoğan seems immune to criticism. His success at expanding access to health, education, and housing has enabled him to win three general elections – each with a greater share of the popular vote than previously. He has broken the power of the military old guard and the hold of its stale Kemalist ideology – the secular nationalism introduced by Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – thereby permanently altering the makeup of Turkish politics. He has presided over the emergence of a vibrant new class of Anatolian entrepreneurs. And, under his rule, Turkey has become a regional power.

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