Where will Erdoğan’s pogrom lead?

Where will Erdoğan’s pogrom lead? (HD).

There is a pogrom of sorts going on in Turkey currently. It reminds one of “The Night of the Long Knives.” It is not such a bloody affair of course, but the aim seems to be the same; namely, to weed out the “rival,” rather than the “enemy” within, although for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan this one-time “ally,” who later became a “rival,” is now a bitter “enemy.”

Erdoğan is on the warpath against Fethullah Gülen and members his Islamist movement, who he says have established a “parallel state within the state.” Secularists have been claiming this for years of course, a claim that Erdoğan rejected in the past. But today he accuses members of the movement of organizing what he refers to as the “Dec. 17 coup attempt.”

That was the day prosecutors unleashed a massive corruption investigation that has shaken his government. Erdoğan sees it as a plot against his government on the eve of crucial local elections. The tripwire starting the current war is the “prep school” issue, which has been covered well by the Hürriyet Daily News.

The public now knows that 350 policemen in Ankara were shifted in one night to other positions. Many were moved from organized crime units to trafficking police. This process actually started shortly after Dec. 17, when a large number of senior police officers were moved away from their jobs.

The same applies to the judiciary, which government sources claim is rife with Gülenists. There are signs that the weeding operation will spread to the finance and education ministries too. Many wonder how the government has managed to find the time, since Dec. 17, to establish whose sympathies lay with whom, given the tens of thousands of people in the state apparatus.

Either Erdoğan had his own secret team of spies keeping tabs on people, or this is just a case of “You kill them all; Allah will separate the good from the bad.” Work is also under way to tamper with the judicial system to ensure it cannot create trouble for the government in the future. This is nothing but a sign of panic.Read the full story here.