On a flight back from India this week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed the West for criticizing Turkey’s state of emergency, in place since the botched coup attempt in July 2016. Speaking to journalists accompanying him on the trip, he said, “The West, which fails to see the state of emergency in France, is attempting to criticize a process that we are carrying out in tranquility. What has the state of emergency in Turkey done? Has it taken away anything from [businesspeople]? Has it affected businesses?” He argued that without the state of emergency, the authorities would have failed to have struggled as well as they have against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and followers of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara calls the Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization (FETO) and holds responsible for the coup attempt.

Given the suspension of basic rights and freedoms, associating the state of emergency with social peace is simply ironic, not to mention that Ankara is flouting even the constitutional limits for the use of emergency-rule powers. For Turkish citizens of a certain age, today’s atmosphere evokes the scary climate of the military rule after the 1980 coup, when the campaign of suppression was called a “tranquility operation.”

Erdogan may claim the state of emergency is conducted in peace, and even without harming anyone, but the toll is out there as plain as day. On April 2, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu offered the following summary of the crackdown on Gulenists or dissidents accused of being such: “So far, 113,260 people have been detained in connection with FETO. The number of those who remain arrested today is 47,155, which is a significant number. There are 41,499 people who have been released on the condition of judicial control, while 23,861 others have been freed (without any further action). Those arrested include 10,732 police officers, 7,463 soldiers, including 168 generals, 2,575 judges and prosecutors, 26,177 civilians and 208 administrative chiefs.”

This, however, is only a partial picture that omits the toll of the crackdown on the Kurds. The state of emergency has seen the detention of some 9,000 members of the Kurdish-dominated Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), about 3,000 of whom remain behind bars. Eleven HDP lawmakers, including both of the party’s co-chairs, are also in jail. The HDP’s sister party, the Democratic Regions Party, which runs 103 local administrations in the mainly Kurdish southeast, has seen 84 of those municipalities handed over to government-appointed trustees and 89 of its co-mayors arrested.