fb-pixelTurkey’s Parliament approves 3-month state of emergency - The Boston Globe Skip to main content

Turkey’s Parliament approves 3-month state of emergency

Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced a three-month state of emergency on Wednesday.Kayhan Ozer via Associated Press

ISTANBUL — The day after Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared a national state of emergency in the wake of a failed coup, an anxious nation awoke on Thursday to a text message from its leader, personally exhorting continued loyalty as the government moved against its enemies.

Urging his supporters to maintain their presence in public squares, where they have flocked each evening since the coup attempt failed, he wrote, “Do not abandon the heroic resistance you have put up for your country, homeland, and flag.”

Even as Turkish officials were more broadly trying to assure the public on Thursday that individual freedoms would not be threatened by the state of emergency, Erdogan’s message to nationwide cellphone customers struck a more martial tone.

In particular, it carried a thinly veiled threat to a wide section of society that Erdogan views as his mortal enemy: the followers of Fethullah Gulen, a former ally and Muslim cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and whom the Turkish government has identified as the mastermind of the coup conspiracy. Turkish officials have demanded that the United States extradite him to face justice in Turkey.

In his nationwide text message, Erdogan cast the nightly gatherings of his supporters in places like Taksim Square, in central Istanbul, as necessary to protect the country from Gulen.

He wrote: “To teach the traitor, the terrorist a lesson, continue your resistance and duty to guard democracy. The owners of our squares are not tanks, but the people.”

In the wake of the failed coup, which plunged the country into chaos after a night of violence that began late Friday, the government has moved quickly to purge from society tens of thousands of people now considered active or potential enemies. Some high-level generals and officers have been arrested on charges of plotting the coup, and thousands of soldiers, judges, teachers, police officers, governors, and others either have been detained or have lost their jobs. All of them, according to the government, have links to Gulen.

Gulen has denied any involvement in the coup plot and insists that his movement within Turkey is peaceful.

Now that Erdogan has declared a state of emergency, giving the state the power to bypass Parliament and pass laws that could possibly limit individual freedoms and suspend the rule of law for issues like pretrial detentions, many Turks are worried that the purge of suspected enemies will broaden. The concern is that Erdogan will target any and all opponents, not just those who are suspected of being followers of Gulen.

On Thursday, many saw a strong signal that was already happening, as a prominent and widely regarded human rights lawyer, Orhan Kemal Cengiz, was detained in Istanbul. The exact reason for his detention was unclear, but Cengiz has been a longtime critic of Erdogan.

“Orhan Kemal Cengiz is a respected human rights lawyer,” said Andrew Gardner, the Turkey researcher for Amnesty International. “He’s a columnist, and a lot of his work is about human rights issues.”

Some speculated that it was Cengiz’s work in the past for newspapers affiliated with Gulen, like Today’s Zaman, seized this year by the government, that led to his detention. If that was the case, it suggested that the government was using a very wide definition of who may be affiliated with Gulen.

“He had worked for Today’s Zaman and other Gulen-affiliated newspapers,” Gardner said. “But he is in no way pushing editorial lines in his columns that are supportive of Fethullah Gulen.”

Still, Turkish officials on Thursday moved to assure the public that the government would target only suspected coup plotters.

“I want to guarantee that fundamental rights and freedoms and normal daily life will not be affected by this,” Numan Kurtulmus, a deputy prime minister, told reporters in Ankara, the capital.