Turkey’s Erdogan Wins Local Election and Vows to Hunt Down ‘Traitors’
You have to give it to the Machiavellian Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan, so far, nothing seems able to shake his position. There has been an extremely damaging corruption scandal involving himself, his son and several prominent cabinet members and their families (inter alia, the scandal involved smuggling gold into Iran to help it circumvent sanctions, and everybody getting a big cut in the process).
This was followed by the recent revelation that the cabinet was pondering a false flag attack on the Tomb of Suleiman in Syria (or alternatively, firing missiles from Syrian territory into Turkey), so as to have a casus belli for military intervention in Syria.
In the course of these scandals, Erdogan brutally suppressed all opposition, banned both Twitter and You-tube in the country and let his police fight it out with protesters in the streets of Istanbul and other big cities. He also purged the judiciary and police, dismissing hundreds of judges and prosecutors in order to stop the investigations into his and his political allies’ corrupt dealings. Some of the purges were laughably transparent, such as the detective heading the corruption investigations in Izmir suddenly finding himself ‘promoted’ to head of Izmir’s traffic department, without explanation.
We previously wrote about Erdogan’s implementation of authoritarian ‘state security’ legislation, which inter aliapurported to make “the internet more safe and freeâ€. Safe, that is, from reporting on corruption in the ruling party.
The suppression of political dissent in Turkey hardly rates a peep from the Western political elites of course. Imagine if Russia’s president Putin had engaged in only a fraction of Erdogan’s antics – we wouldn’t stop hearing about it and he’d be buried in threats.
And yet – after all this – Erdogan’s party won local elections over the weekend. It is evidently a case of Turkey not necessarily getting the government it needs, but the one it deserves. Although receiving only 45% of the vote, Erdogan’s party has has obtained a clear majority (the major opposition party only got 28%). Now Erdogan wants his ‘enemies to pay a price’:
“Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan declared victory in local polls that had become a referendum on his rule and said he would “enter the lair” of enemies who have accused him of corruption and leaked state secrets. “They will pay for this,” he said.
Erdogan spoke from a balcony at his AK Party headquarters to thousands of cheering supporters as early results showed it winning some 44-46 percent of the vote, and the opposition CHP trailing with 23-28 percent.
Erdogan accuses a U.S.-based Islamic cleric, a former ally, of mounting a smear campaign using a network of followers in the police force to concoct a corruption case against him. In response he has purged the police force of thousands of members.
Last week the crisis reached a new level when a secret top-level security meeting about Syria was taped and posted on You-Tube. The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, denies any involvement in the security leak or the corruption investigation.
“This is the wedding day of the new Turkey,” Erdogan said. “Today is the victory day of the new Turkey, 77 million united and together as brothers.”
It is noteworthy that Reuters merely mentions a ‘top level security meeting leak’, while not even breathing one word about the content of said leak (a false flag attack). You’d think that would at least rate a one sentence comment, but it evidently doesn’t. We only point this out as an example of how our mainstream press always very subtly tailors its news reports, both by commission and omission. One can of course find reports on the contents of the leak, but the way the details are glossed over in this article is still remarkable.
