Just ten years ago, Turkish Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc recalled a dramatic scene. One diplomat dropped his teacup upon hearing that he was posted to Mongolia with 5,000 USD, special residence, and a car — a lavish job at that time. “How can I live there?” the diplomat reportedly asked, according to Arinc.
In yet another example of scapegoating the Gülen movement for anything bad in Turkey or in anywhere else in the world, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s chief advisor Yiğit Bulut hinted at connections between FETÖ and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.
While critics say that Gülen is at best a cult figure, he is considered by many the legitimate spiritual leader of an Islamic movement that is focused on humanitarian service – hence the common name Hizmet – as well as interfaith dialogue and education.
B.N.M., a freshman high school student killed herself allegedly after being bullied by classmates and lecturers over her teacher father’s dismissal from the profession due to his ties to the Gülen movement, on Oct. 24.
In a written statement released both in Turkish and English, UK-based academic Özcan Keleş denied recent allegations about him that appeared in Turkey’s mostly pro-government media outlets, saying that only his name, his father’s name, his hometown and the fact that Aksaray is a city in Turkey were accurate in the articles. “Everything else is untrue,” Keleş says.
The power struggle between the Turkish state and the Fethullah Gulen-led Hizmet Movement continues to reverberate in Turkey. The number detained, arrested, jailed, and dismissed from their jobs since the July 15 coup attempt has reached well over 100,000, 40,000 of whom have been detained on suspicion of having links with Hizmet. One third of the highest-ranking armed forces officers have been dismissed. Almost every major institution—military, judiciary, media, education, business—has been affected.
Nearly three dozen Turkish diplomats and family members have claimed asylum in Germany over alleged affiliation to the network of US-based opposition leader Fethullah Gulen, whom the government in Ankara claims to have masterminded the failed July 15 coup attempt.
“It’s a kind of civil death,” Kerem Altiparmak, a human rights lawyer and political science professor at Ankara University told Los Angeles Times on Wednesday when describing how the lives of thousands of people change after the July 15 coup attempt.
Turkey’s infamous mob boss Alaattin Çakıcı implied in a letter to the Justice Ministry that his mafia network could kill Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen in Pennsylvania and his senior followers elsewhere in the world. Çakıcı’s letter came weeks after Turkey’s controversial request that the US extradite Gülen.