Eurasia And Eme Subcommittee on Europe

Turkey's Democratic Decline Eurasia And Eme Subcommittee on Europe

Turkey and America have been and are friends. Friends speak plainly to one another about problems. There is a mounting body of evidence suggesting that President Erdogan's party and his regime seems to be involved with corruption and misrule that is taking Turkey in exactly the wrong direction. President Erdogan's party has used the levers of power to limit dissent and to crack down on free journalism. Thousands of judges and prosecutors have been reassigned based on their political inclinations. Immunity from parliamentarians has been lifted, opening the way for charges to be used against them in order to sideline opposition, especially those in the HDP. An important casualty of the Erdogan's political aspirations and Turkey's democratic decline is the community known as the Gulen or Hizmet movement. The government has targeted the movement especially since the outbreak of the corruption scandal in Turkey in December 2013. According to Erdogan and his lieutenants, the corruption allegations brought forward were, in fact, an insidious attempt to topple the AKP government. The movement in Turkey now faces blanket persecution. According to the news, state news agency, as of July 2016, more than 4,000 individuals have been detained and about 1,000 have been sent to jail.