No plan for widespread repression, says Turkey

The Turkish government has sought to assure its citizens and foreign allies that it will not embark on a wave of repression after criticism of its response to last week’s failed coup grew louder.

A nationwide state of emergency, the first since the 1980s, came into force on Thursday, allowing the government to rule by decree, impose curfews and censor the media. Ankara invoked its right to suspend its obligations temporarily under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Coming after the arrest or suspension of 60,000 public servants, including judges, soldiers and teachers, critics at home and abroad have accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of using the backlash against those responsible for last Friday's botched uprising to tighten his grip on power.

For some Turks, the government’s latest move raised fears of a return to martial law after a 1980 military coup, or the height of a Kurdish insurgency in the 1990s, when much of the largely Kurdish southeast was under a state of emergency declared by the previous government.

Stronger democracy

Rejecting such comparisons, prime minister

Mehmet Simsek

said the government would not use many of the new powers. “The state of emergency in

Turkey

won’t include restrictions on movement, gatherings and free press etc. It isn’t martial law of 1990s,” he wrote on Twitter. “I’m confident Turkey will come out of this with much stronger democracy, better functioning market economy & enhanced investment climate.”

Turkey-based Selim Sazak of the Century Foundation, a New York think tank, also played down the suggestion the new legal regime could amount to martial law. Martial law was "the suspension of the political system, the political process," he said.

“That is not what is happening in Turkey today.”

The two key rights the emergency law gave the executive were the power to suspend education and to order cross-border military operations without parliamentary approval. “I don’t think Erdogan has any interest in pushing this state of emergency further,” Mr Sazak, who described himself as a secular liberal, said.

State of emergency

Foreign leaders continued to express concern about Ankara's response. In a joint statement, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn said the EU was "concerned" about the latest development and believed the crackdown so far in education, the judiciary and the media was "unacceptable."

German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned the government against extending the state of emergency beyond three months, saying this “would exacerbate tensions inside Turkey”. He also expressed doubt about the legality of banning university professors from teaching and preventing researchers from leaving the country, as Ankara ordered earlier this week.

Mr Erdogan has dismissed the foreign criticism, pointing out France responded to terrorist attacks in Paris last November by declaring a longer, six-month state of emergency, which it has since extended. Mr Erdogan said the sweep was not yet over and he believed foreign countries might have been involved.

A nationalist opposition party supported the state of emergency but other opposition politicians were uneasy. “Once you obtain this mandate, you create a way of ruling that paves the way for abuse,” Sezgin Tanrikulu, a parliamentarian with the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) told Reuters. “The coup attempt was rebuffed with parliament and opposition support, and the government could have fought this with more measured methods.”