Turkish government escalates crackdown on opposition as toll of Afrin invasion mounts
By
Halil Celik
9 March 2018
As the toll of Ankara’s invasion of the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin rises, along with popular anger over growing poverty, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, led by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has further escalated its police-state crackdown.
Last Friday, the Turkish police detained an additional 154 people, including 16 navy officers, 66 teachers and 72 unionists over alleged links to the July 15, 2016 attempted coup that was defeated by a mass movement, in which more than 240 people were killed by putschists.
This came a day after a prosecutor in the Istanbul 13th Criminal Court demanded 13-year prison sentences for executives and employees of the broadcaster Hayatin Sesi (Voice of Life), accused of “successively propagating for terrorist organizations”. According to the indictment, the defendants made propaganda for the Islamic State (IS), the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), because they broadcast scenes of bomb attacks in Ankara and Istanbul in 2016.
On February 28, the Istanbul 26th Criminal Court imposed an additional jail term of five years and 11 months against the prominent journalist Ahmet Altan for “making propaganda for a terror organization” and “insulting the president,” stemming from an article he wrote for a news website years ago.
The court punished Altan because of his description of Ankara’s “Trench Operations” against the PKK two years ago, during which 14,048 special army and police forces largely destroyed the Kurdish-populated towns of Sur, Silopi, Cizre and Nusaybin, killed at least 1,300 Kurds and forcing more than 90,000…