HRW Turkey head says post-coup crackdown aimed at building empire of fear in country
Human Rights Watch’s Turkey director Emma Sinclair-Webb said the government’s post-coup crackdown is aimed at establishing an empire of fear in the country.
Speaking at a rights symposium in the eastern province of Diyarbakir on Monday, she said arbitrariness is the best word to describe the post-coup period in Turkey, the Turkey Purge reports.
“There are detentions, arrests, dismissals and bans, but we can describe this period as arbitrary in short,” she said adding that an empire of fear is aimed with such arbitrary practices.
Turkish government declared a three-month emergency rule in the wake of the July 15, 2016 and has extended it for 5 times since.
Some 150,000 have lost their jobs, more than 126,000 have been detained and some 56,000 including academics, judges, doctors, teachers, lawyers, students, policemen and many from different backgrounds have been put in pre-trial detention under emergency rule.
Armed with emergency powers, the government has been wiping out its dissidents, critics say.