Mind-boggling revelations of lawlessness and sleaze that might ordinarily shake a normal country once in a decade seem to be happening on a daily basis in Turkey these days.<\/p>\n
Take a look at the news of the past 48 hours to see what I am talking about.<\/p>\n
A day after admitting the authenticity of two wiretapped phone conversations in which he first interferes in a major defence tender in favour of a government-friendly company and then discusses the ways to get a leading media proprietor behind bars by influencing the courts, the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has surpassed even his own record.<\/p>\n
This time we heard a leaked recording of the Prime minister talking on the phone with the owner of a leading national newspaper Milliyet.\u00a0 Mr Erdogan berates the proprietor, Erdo\u011fan Demir\u00f6ren for allowing a story about the minutes of a meeting between the Kurdish leader Ocalan and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy party deputies visiting him in jail. The prime minister considers the article in question a malicious attempt to derail the talks with the Kurdish leader. He refers to the editor-in-chief and the veteran journalist that uncovered the story as \u201cdisgraceful, vile, scandalous and dishonorable\u201d individuals. Mr Demir\u00f6ren stutters, apologizes and promises to deal with the matter urgently. Not being able to calm Erdogan down, the 76-year old wealthy businessman bursts into tears, muttering \u201cHow and why did I get into this business?\u201d<\/p>\n
If this recording alone wasn\u2019t enough to make you cringe, Mr Erdogan later appeared live on a pro-government television channel, ready to be quizzed by four hand-picked celebrity journalists. They ignored the corruption allegations and opted for questions about Erdogan\u2019s sleep patterns and dietary habits. We learnt that the Prime Minister sleeps 6-7 hours and breakfasts on honey and clotted cream.<\/p>\n
After that, Mr Erdogan dropped his next bomb-shell.<\/p>\n
Referring to Facebook and YouTube, the Prime Minister said that his government would take further steps following the March 30 elections, including the option of closing these sites fully, adding \u201cWe will not let these companies capture the nation\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mr Erdogan condemned leaked conversations on the internet as an attempt to blackmail him but he did not explicitly deny their authenticity. None of the four famous journalists quizzed him about it.<\/p>\n
He was asked if his government would request the extradition of Pennsylvania-based preacher Fethullah Gulen from the US. He replied that he spoke to President Barack Obama about this. He told him that the source of the unrest in Turkey was residing there and the President understood the message.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Turkey’s telecommunications regulatory agency TiB said half a million people were wiretapped in 2012-2013. Fed on a daily diet of scandal and lawlessness, it became just another data.<\/p>\n
In a country where, according to the main opposition party CHP, \u00a0last year alone more than 800 women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, the state failed to protect another young woman. In Istanbul, a 19 year old university student got killed in broad daylight on a bus. Her brother told the media that his family twice asked for police protection and presented the authorities with the evidence of previous death threats to his sister. The police ignored it.<\/p>\n
She, too, was added to the grim statistics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mind-boggling revelations of lawlessness and sleaze that might ordinarily shake a normal country once in a decade seem to be happening on a daily basis in Turkey these days. Take a look at the news of the past 48 hours to see what I am talking about. A day after admitting the authenticity of two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firdevstalkturkey.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}