Another Turkish witch hunt begins
In Turkey, one alleged crime always leads to a larger conspiracy theory, demonizing and punishing a large group of people.
On Dec. 14, Turkey woke up to breaking news: Turkish police detained 25 people, including top media figures and police officers, simultaneously raiding addresses in 13 cities across the country. The detainees included Ekrem Dumanli, the editor-in-chief of Zaman, Turkey’s top-selling newspaper, and Hidayet Karaca, the director of STV, a news channel. What they all had in common was their affiliation with the Fethullah Gulen movement — an Islamic community that once was the best ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but which turned into his worst enemy after the corruption investigations of December 2013.
What made these arrests even more controversial was that they were foretold by the mysterious “Fuat Avni,” a faceless Twitter account that claims to be a hidden deep throat within the top echelons of the Erdogan government. With some 629,000 followers (@fuatavnifuat), this account wrote on Dec. 11, or three days before the arrests, that “the Tyrant” (i.e., Erdogan) has ordered a new crackdown on opposition media and some 150 journalists would be arrested soon. Since then, supportive crowds have been flocking to the building of the daily Zaman, which “Fuat Avni” identified as the main target of the upcoming raid. On Sunday, the warnings turned true, when the police indeed came to Zaman to detain Ekrem Dumanli, in the midst of a large crowd cheering for press freedom.
Yet, at least so far, the “crackdown on opposition media” has been less widespread than what Fuat Avni had predicted. As the press reported, the detainee list includes some 31 names, at the top of which is Fethullah Gulen himself. (But his arrest was impossible, since he has lived in Pennsylvania, in the United States since 1999.) Others are either certain policemen alleged to be members of the movement, or certain journalists and film producers. And they are all blamed of leading or taking part in an “operation” against an Islamist group called “Tahsiyeciler,” which the Gulen movement allegedly sees as a threat or rival to itself.
The “Tahsiyeciler,” or, literally, “those who make footnotes,” are a small Turkish Islamist community that claims to follow the teachings of Islamic scholar Said Nursi (1878-1960). “Yet they are more radical in ideology than most Nursi followers,” an expert on this tradition told me, “in that they denounce democracy and advocate an Islamist state.” Yet, the same expert added that the group has never been violent. However, both the leader of the group, Mehmet Dogan, and 10 of his followers were arrested in 2010 in a widespread detention of alleged al-Qaeda members all across Turkey, which was then reported in the international media, including The New York Times.
