Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has received the complaints of around 30,000 people negatively affected by the ongoing purge in Turkey against the members of the Gülen movement, a CHP official has said.
“We have held face-to-face meetings with more than 4,000 people in the last two months. We have also received appeals via e-mail and telephone,” CHP Party Assembly member Gamze Taşçıer told daily Cumhuriyet on Sept. 14.
Taşçıer said the number of cases that the party has recorded since July 15 is currently around 30,000, showing that the government’s sweeping actions are creating a new group of victims.
Turkey survived a military coup attempt on July 15 that killed over 240 people and wounded more than a thousand others. Immediately after the putsch, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government along with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pinned the blame on the Gülen movement.
Despite Gülen and the movement having denied the accusation and calling for an international investigation, Erdoğan — calling the coup attempt “a gift from God” — and the government launched a widespread purge aimed at cleansing sympathizers of the movement from within state institutions, dehumanizing its popular figures and putting them in custody.
More than 100,000 people have been purged from state bodies, nearly 43,000 detained and 23,500 arrested since the coup attempt. Arrestees include journalists, judges, prosecutors, police and military officers, academics, governors and even a comedian. (Turkey Purge)