Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I am free—but Turkey is not

Solidarity with the head of pro-Kurdish party

" Turkey has been under a state of emergency since a failed coup in July 2016, with 107,000 public servants and soldiers dismissed from their jobs. More than 50,000 people have been imprisoned pending trial since the uprising." The BBC is lost in translation. In the very same paragraph , "coup" and "uprising" were used to mean the same thing. We know that what happened in 2016 was a coup and the major Western powers were slow to condemn it. They played watch-and-see first. In these elections, the HDP has scored above the 10% threshold that will aloow it to enter parliament despite its leader being in prison. The 2016 coup: an analysis by Stratfor "Regardless of whether Erdogan is at its helm, Turkey will continue down its expansionist path, a path that was unlikely to be short-circuited by a haphazard coup led by a motley group of Islamists and nationalists. Turkey is on this course, at this stage in history, because geopolitics wills it. B

" Ever since  the Gezi Uprising in 2013, Turkey has witnessed a whirlwind of events: popular upsurges, a coup attempt, pivotal elections, changes in the political system, war within the country, war in Syria, bombing attacks. The country has been under an official state of emergency since a failed coup in July 2016, and the country’s economic model hit the fan in 2013. Erdoğan and his ruling clique have responded to these various crises in the same way: by holding ever tighter onto power and using increasingly oppressive and brutal means to consolidate their standing — a process of outright  fascization , if a very fragile one. The upcoming snap elections are just latest attempt by Erdoğan to stabilize his dominance, this time by quasi-democratic means." The Turkish elections

"In reality, there was never any golden age of liberalization under Erdoğan. The praise he attracted from Western elites as a ‘moderate’ and a ‘reformer’ was motivated above all by the  AKP ’s staunchly pro-American foreign policy and readiness to maintain good relations with Israel (the same criteria that earn the Saudi regime its ludicrous plaudits as a moderating force in the region). It also helped that  NATO ’s favourite Islamists had taken up the neoliberal agenda with gusto, privatizing state assets into the hands of  AKP  cronies—including Erdoğan’s close relatives." Erdogan's cesspit

Turkey's People's Democratic Party (HDP)