People wave national flags as they wait for Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan arrival to the United Solidarity and Brotherhood rally in Gaziantep, Turkey, August 28, 2016. REUTERS/Umit Bektas
ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish authorities have suspended about 8,000 security personnel and more than 2,000 academics, adding to a purge of people suspected of having links to perpetrators of a failed coup, the Official Gazette said on Friday.
Since the coup attempt in mid-July, in which rogue soldiers tried to topple President Tayyip Erdogan’s government, Turkey has removed 80,000 people from public duty and arrested many of them, accusing them of sympathizing with the plotters.
Of the security personnel removed in the latest purge, 323 were members of the gendarmerie and the rest police, according to the Official Gazette, in which the government publishes new laws and orders.
It said 2,346 more academics had been removed from universities. Hundreds of academics and others have already been swept from their posts, accused of links to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan says masterminded the coup.
About 3,300 judiciary officials have also been dismissed, leaving a depleted workforce to manage the legal process against a growing number of detainees.
The Gazette said retired judges and prosecutors would be allowed to return to work if they applied to do so in the next two months.
(Reporting by Ece Toksabay; Writing by Edmund Blair; editing by John Stonestreet)
The important thing to realize here is that Fethullah Gulen gained the power he has within Turkey by starting in the elementary schools many years ago. He bought those first, and indoctrinated the grade school students. By the time they were ready to go to middle and high school, Gulen had those opened and waiting, Finally, he opened colleges, and his graduates ended up in other universities throughout Turkey. President Erdogan was himself educated in the Gulen schools, and knows the extent of the indoctrination. I don’t know what the fight between the two men is over, but there was a definite falling out, and Gulen ended up fleeing Turkey. He sought asylum in America, and has been busily following the same plan he used in Turkey to ruin America’s schools.
I’m no fan of Erdogan, but what he is purging is NOT education per se. He is purging Gulen’s influence from his country, and that means getting rid of many educators. And guess what, folks!!! Almost all the teachers in Gulen’s schools are here from Turkey on visas granted by obama & co. If you have one of them in your community (we do!!!), they are full of Gulenists here on a visa. We don’t have enough unemployed teachers in the U.S.!?! Sure we do, but they can’t teach your children to speak Turkish, all about the jinn, or how to pray five times a day facing Mecca. Erdogan is a BAD man, but so is Gulen. We need to send Gulen and all his Turkish teachers back where they came from before they gain enough influence to overthrow our government which is their aim. And if you send your children a charter school, be very, very aware of who owns and runs it, or your children may be victims of these people.