TURKEY:ERDOGAN EYES RENEWED RUSSIA
,CHINA TIES
BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU,IN LAGOS,NIGERIA,PATRICK
KINGSLEY,IN ISTANBUL,TURKEY
TURKEY IS BOILING OVER THE RESULTS OF THE Referendum
In the aftermath of the just
concluded Turkish political and constitutional referendum ,a public affairs
analyst in Nigeria has decried the
additional powers given to President Recep Erdogan by the people of Turkey.
The Public Affairs analysts [names
with held]had pointed out while discussing with this reporter over the issue
that the body language of President Erdogan appears to be a man interested more
in strengthening existing diplomatic ties with Russia and China among other
nations with communist and socialist aura .
Checks by The News Office Desk of
Paedia Express Multimedia Group in Lagos ,Nigeria ,shows that the referendum
which recently ended in a narrow victory
for Erdogan has handed him a lot of sweeping powers to rule via military fiat
or roll out decrees without giving a thought to the feeling of the press ,civil societies and the
opposition in any form which will be bad for democracy in Turkey.
The source wondered why Erdogan was
hell bent on going back to the stone age by saying he wanted to revert to
meting out capital punishments for anyone that errs as against the norm
saying this will obviously dim or
foreclose the chances of Trkey from joining the European Union .
The source affirmed that with
Erdogan’s new sweeping powers ,he can now decide who becomes his number two
single handedly and also decide what happens in the Parliament with Turkey
finally embracing full blow dictatorship.
The source lamented that a nation
like Turkey ,which was a gateway between Europe and Asia should have served as
good buffer zone for the rest of Europe due to its strategic location along the
Bosphorus River in Istanbul ,Turkey but
all that was now going to slip off the hands of the European Union.
ISTANBUL — Dozens of members of Turkey’s
political opposition were arrested in dawn raids on Wednesday, as a crackdown
began on those questioning the legitimacy of a referendum on Sunday to expand the powers of
President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Erdogan has claimed a narrow
51.4 percent to 48.6 percent victory in the vote, but protesters in pockets of
the country have marched in the streets every night since then to demonstrate
against what they assert was a rigged election.
After warnings from Mr. Erdogan, at
least 38 people accused of participating in the protests were rounded up
Wednesday morning or issued arrest warrants, according to lawyers and relatives
of the detained.
Despite the arrests hundreds of
people gathered in several cities across Turkey on Wednesday evening in a show
of defiance.
“For the past five years they have
been trying to turn Turkey into an empire of fear,” said Serhat, a 27-year-old
attending a protest in Istanbul, who asked that his surname not be published,
for fear of being arrested.
“But there will always be people who
won’t bow to them,” Serhat, a TV producer, added.
Though tens of thousands of people have been detained
for political reasons in Turkey in recent months, these were the first
political arrests reported since the referendum.
“These people are mainly those who
attended the protests after the referendum and raised their voice against the
referendum result on social media,” said Deniz Demirdogen, a lawyer for one of
the detainees, Mesut Gecgel.
“The police told the detainees that
they were accused of trying to agitate people against the ‘yes’ vote,” Mr.
Demirdogen said by telephone from the police station in Istanbul where his
client had been taken.
Abdurrahman Atalay, a prominent
political activist who filed an appeal on Tuesday against the referendum
result, was also detained. His nephew, Can Atalay, said by telephone that the
police had told Mr. Atalay that he was being charged for “inciting hatred among
people by claiming the referendum result is dubious.”
Several of the detainees are from
the United
June Movement, a group formed after the mass protests in June 2013 against Mr. Erdogan’s
government.
The arrests will add to fears that
Sunday’s referendum has accelerated Turkey’s descent toward authoritarianism.
Mr. Erdogan and his allies say their victory will help bring stability and prosperity to the country, while
their critics argue that it will give the president too much power, insulate
the post from judicial scrutiny and, as a result, contribute to greater
instability.
Two international observer missions
said the referendum campaign had been conducted in an unfair environment in
which opposition voices were suppressed.
Observers also criticized the
government for holding the vote during a state of emergency that was imposed
after the failed coup in July against Mr. Erdogan.
Since then, roughly 45,000 people
suspected of being dissidents and of plotting the coup have been arrested, more
than 150 media groups and 1,500 civil society organizations have been closed,
and about 130,000 people have been purged from their jobs. Anti-Erdogan
campaigners faced physical intimidation and restrictions on their ability to
hold rallies and to appear in the news media.
An Interior Ministry official said
that no one was available to comment by telephone on the arrests, and asked
that requests for comment be submitted by email.
In a separate development on
Wednesday, Turkey’s electoral commission rejected an appeal by the opposition
to annul the entire referendum. The opposition had based the appeal on the
commission’s controversial decision — made while voting was still in progress
on Sunday — to raise the burden needed to prove allegations of ballot-box
stuffing.
International observers and legal
experts said that this decision, made at the request of a member of Mr.
Erdogan’s party, broke electoral law and contradicted the commission’s previous
decisions. But the commission rejected the argument early on Wednesday evening.
Thousands of individual appeals of
individual ballot boxes nevertheless remain in play, keeping open the
possibility that the final vote tallies might yet change.
Bulent Tezcan, the deputy head of
the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., criticized
the appeal’s rejection. “We call it organized election fraud, organized
stealing of votes,” Mr. Tezcan said.
The rejection of the appeal came as
more allegations of electoral fraud emerged. The secretary of the C.H.P. in
Istanbul, Dr. Hakki Saglam, suggested that as many as 200,000 ballot papers in
Istanbul alone may have been added to ballot boxes illegally, since they had
not been validated with an official stamp.
Follow Patrick Kingsley on Twitter @patrickkingsley.
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