Following Friday’s failed military coup, Turkey’s state media is hard at work building an official narrative of what happened, with an eye toward keeping public support strong for the ongoing purge of the Turkish government of anybody even suspected of disloyalty.
The Anadolu news agency made it very clear that Gen. Akin Ozturk, who served as the Air Force Chief from 2013 to 2015, was to blame for the matter, claiming he had confessed to prosecutors during his post-coup interrogation that he had planned the coup.
Gen. Ozturk, however, insisted that this was not the case, he says that he was neither the ringleader of Friday’s coup nor was he involved at all in the planning stages of it. He says he told the prosecutors that he didn’t know who was behind the coup, but that he suspected the Gulen Movement was involved.
Turkish officials are keen to charge Fethullah Gulen with treason over the coup, though getting him extradited from the US may be difficult, given the lack of actual evidence of his involvement. Gulen condemned the coup, and he too denies involvement.
Erdogan may think that by “cleaning house” he is insulating himself from further dissent but he may be leaving those who oppose him but one option: TLG. Just sayin’…
I happen to agree with you on this issue. Erdogan, indeed, may believe that by “cleaning house”, he’s insulating himself from further dissent; but, as you said, he may be leaving those who oppose him but one option: TLG.
I feel certain that Erdogan’s making the same mistake that USSR Dictator Josef Stalin made early in 1937. Both men’s personalities are quite similar .. paranoid, egotistical and lustful for total power. Stalin’s purge of the Red Army’s officer corps (“cleaning house”) left it weak and vulnerable, and Erdogan’s purge is doing the same to Turkey’s military. The only difference between the two similar actions is that there was no coup attempt in the USSR in 1937 – staged or otherwise. Stalin simply felt that the officer corps was a little too bourgeois, which was a threat to his power.
It wasn’t until 8 years after the end of WWII that Stalin was assassinated by a group of physicians by adding poison to his drink, inducing a major stroke that finally killed him. The same could very well happen to Erdogan .. inducing either a stroke or a heart attack by adding poison to his coffee or tea.