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ISTANBUL Tens of thousands of Turks came out in force in an Istanbul suburb on Sunday in a direct challenge to their president as they called for an end to a state of emergency that has been in place since a failed coup in July 2016.

The mammoth protest organized by the opposition Republican Peoples Party, or CHP was a rare display of public dissent in a country where tens of thousands have been jailed as part of a systematic post-coup purge of dissidents and other government opponents. Even small demonstrations in central Istanbul have often been met with a harsh police response.

But Sundays rally, which organizers claimed drew more than a million people, marked a triumphant end to a march started by opposition leaders in Ankara three weeks ago.

[March for justice by Erdogan opponents gains momentum and alarms government]

The lawmakers and others walked from the capital, Ankara, to Istanbuls seaside a journey of about 280 miles. That walk, led by the mild-mannered CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, ended up breathing new life into an opposition that just months ago was on the verge of irrelevance.

Kilicdaroglu, in an uncharacteristically fiery speech on Sunday, called the rally a new step, a new history, a new birth. He read out a list of demands for the government of President Recep Tayyip Erodgan, including giving parliament back its authority and releasing jailed lawmakers and journalists.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was in Istanbul on Sunday, met with Erodgan and lauded Turkish citizens for taking to the streets a year ago to protest the coup attempt.

Nearly a year ago, the Turkish people brave men and women stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy, Tillerson said in remarks at an oil industry conference. He did not mention the Istanbul demonstration, nor did he raise the government crackdown.

In April, Kilicdaroglu failed to mount a successful challenge as a referendum on constitutional amendments granted sweeping powers to Erdogan. Last year, Kilicdaroglu voted along with the presidents party to lift lawmakers immunity from prosecution. That move was unpopular among his supporters. But in recent weeks, Kilicdaroglu has inspired ordinary Turks to join his march and voice their concerns about the countrys direction. We marched for our country. This is just the beginning, said Aydin Parlak, a 59-year-old retiree from the city of Samsun on Turkeys Black Sea coast.

We live in a country that has the highest number of journalists in jail, he said. This is the first time in 15 years [since Erdogan came to power] that the opposition party is on the news, that its the main topic of conversation in the country.

[As Erdogan gains power in Turkey, a weakened opposition tries to stand in his way]

Turkeys political woes have percolated for years, buffeted by a homegrown ethnic Kurdish insurgency and spillover from the Syrian civil war next door. Amid the chaos, Erdogan, an Islamist once lauded as one of the few democratic leaders in the region, began exhibiting authoritarian tendencies. He targeted journalists for articles and tweets that he said insulted the president. Rights activists also soon found themselves on trial or in jail.

But it was the coup attempt last summer when a rogue faction of the military bombed parliament, seized bridges in Istanbul, and tried to assassinate the president that accelerated the clampdown on dissent. In a bid to root out coup supporters, the government detained tens of thousands and dismissed thousands more from their jobs as judges, professors, police officers and doctors.

Kilicdaroglu, who condemned the coup and extended his support to Erdogan, began his march on June 15, one day after CHP lawmaker Enis Berberoglu was arrested. Berberoglu, a former journalist, was sentenced to prison for providing the independent Cumhuriyet newspaper with a video purportedly showing Turkish intelligence sending weapons to Syrian rebels.

In a country where more than 150 journalists are in prison, there cannot be even a semblance of democracy, Kilicdaroglu said Sunday, as he shared his list of demands.

In his speech at the rally, he said the demonstration marked a new beginning for the country. Its a new climate, a new history, a new birth.

Some who attended the protest were not as hopeful, though.

The judiciary is not independent. Im hopeless about our situation. [Erdogan] is a dictator, said 41-year-old Gulben Efes, a doctor from Ankara. But, she said, she came to the demonstration for my children, for my country.

In the blazing sun, with temperatures nearing 90 degrees, the young and the old, dressed in the red and white of the Turkish flag, chanted for rights, law, justice! Demonstrators also donned T-shirts and baseball caps emblazoned with the word adalet, Turkish for justice. Buses and ferries carried some demonstrators to the venue, in the Istanbul suburb of Maltepe. Police also patrolled the march.

We did it, we are here, said Aytug Atici, a CHP lawmaker from the city of Mersin. He walked from Ankara to Istanbul.

We are looking for justice, he said. Since there is no justice in the courts, we are trying to find justice in the streets.

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In divided Turkey, president defends victory in referendum granting new powers

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Turkey's opposition stages massive rally in a show of strength against Erdogan - Washington Post

Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the G20 leaders summit in Hamburg, Germany. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

This week is the first anniversary of the failed coup against Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdoan, a coup he has used since to further alienate his opponents. Most recently, on 16 April, he won a referendum to become head of state and head of government simultaneously, emerging as the most unassailable Turkish politician since Mustafa Kemal Atatrk established the secular republic in 1923.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Atatrk shaped Turkey in his own image as a western society. In his Turkey, the state banished religion to the private sphere and discriminated against pious citizens. But since 2003, Erdoan has dismantled Atatrks societal model, flooding political and education systems with rigidly conservative Islam, as well as pivoting Turkey away from Europe and the west.

This is, paradoxically, Erdoans Atatrk side. Of course, Erdoan does not share his values, just his methods. Just as Atatrk reshaped Turkey, so Erdoan is building a new country, but one that sees itself as profoundly Islamist in politics and foreign policy to make it a great power once again.

Erdoan is an anti-Atatrk Atatrk. As I explain in my book The New Sultan, having grown up in secularist Turkey and faced social exclusion at a young age because of his piety, Erdoan is motivated by animosity towards Atatrks ways. Yet he has dismantled Atatrks system by using the very tools that the countrys founding elites provided: state institutions and top-down social engineering.

Erdoan has used the founders means and methods to replace even Atatrk himself. The end product is that Turkey now discriminates against citizens who do not first and foremost identify through conservative political Islamism, the branch to which Erdoan belongs. However, Erdoan has a problem: whereas Atatrk came to power as a military general, the president has a democratic mandate to govern. And what is more, Turkey is split almost down the middle Erdogan won the April referendum with only 51% popular support.

Despite this, Erdoan wants to change Turkey in his own image in the way that Atatrk did and herein lies the crisis of modern Turkey: half of the country embraces Erdoans brand of politics, but the other half vehemently opposes it. So long as Turkey is genuinely democratic, Erdoan cannot continue to govern the way he likes to.

This has given birth to Erdoans dark, illiberal side: in order to push forward with his platform of revolutionary change against a split society, he has been cracking down on his opponents and locking up dissidents. Although he has won elections democratically, Erdoan has gradually become more autocratic, ensuring, once he has won an election, that the political playing field is uneven in order to prevent power from escaping his hands.

Accordingly, although Turkeys elections continue to be free, they are increasingly not fair. Erdoans electoral strategy has created deeply entrenched polarisation in Turkey: his conservative base, constituting about half of the country, has zealously rallied around him in his defence; the other half resents him.

Last years failed coup only sharpened Turkeys dilemma. Although the initial post-coup purges and arrests targeted members of the conservative Glen movement erstwhile allies who seem to have turned against him in the coup Erdoan has since cast a wide net, arresting anyone who opposes him. He has jailed 40,000 people since the coup, purging another 150,000. His opponents now loathe him.

But Erdoan does not seem to take notice. On 18 May, he declared that the state of emergency put in place after the 2016 coup would be extended until there is welfare and peace in the country. He has even threatened todetainKemal Kilicdarolu, head of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP), who is currently leading a march from Ankara to Istanbul to protest against Erdoans ongoing crackdown. Erdoan knows that he cannot continue to govern Turkey the way he likes so long as it is a democracy which is why he is now taking steps to end democracy.

Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of The New Sultan: Erdoan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey

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One year on from the failed coup, Recep Tayyip Erdoan is more ... - The Guardian

Bessma Momani is professor at the University of Waterloo and Balsillie School of International Affairs and Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Innovation.

U.S. President Donald Trumps speech in Warsaw last Friday reaffirmed a troubling pattern emerging among todays populist leaders from Mr. Trump to Venezuelas Nicolas Maduro, Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Polands Andrzej Duda, and Hungarys Viktor Orban. Mr. Trumps words were not empty rhetoric and must not be ignored. They echo a populist rhetoric representative of a doctrine that ought to worry us all.

Populist leaders often evoke impassioned binaries: Us against them, good versus evil, civilized and uncivilized. Mr. Trump made it clear that he believes Mr. Dudas government stands up for and represents civilized, God-loving people, despite its international reputation as a government that has cracked down on human rights organizations. Populists believe they, and only they, represent the true will of the people and that the establishment is undermining them at all times.

For them, the establishment includes jurists, academic experts, intellectuals, journalists and civil servants. Mr. Trump, like so many of his fellow populists, see these enemies of the people as internal forces that must be stopped. Disturbingly, populists propagate the idea that they are the pure, authentic voice of the people, and those progressive-leaning elites in the establishment are unpatriotic, or even represent foreign interests.

Populists believe that God is always on their side in the battle against the establishment, because it is they who stand up for civilization and all things good. When Mr. Trump asked the cheering crowds of 15,000 in a Warsaw square, Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?, make no mistake that the subversive forces he alludes to are all of those democratic institutions that oppose him.

Courts that challenge populists to live up to international laws, treaties and human rights conventions are disparaged as unpatriotic. Few reputable jurists could justify the discrimination of entry and travel based on ones ethnic or racial community. But it is egalitarian principles that populists abhor, because it denies the moral superiority of the people who are of the populist base. The undertones of populists racialized messages are never too far from the surface.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Duda and Mr. Orban are challenging their own courts independence, and slowly stacking them with those who are believed to be loyal to their doctrine. Mr. Maduro suspended his attorney-general for challenging his economic policies and stripping the Venezuelan legislature of its power. Mr. Erdogan is changing the constitution to centralize power in his office and will oversee the very body that approves Turkeys jurists.

It is civil society organizations, like Amnesty International, that Mr. Orban, Mr. Duda and Mr. Erdogan see as enemies of the people by trying to pollute the morality of their state. This week, Mr. Erdogan arrested Amnesty Internationals director in Turkey along with 22 lawyers, adding to the already 50,000 Turks arrested and detained and the 150,000 suspended from their jobs.

It should be no surprise that some of the most ardent liberal advocates of human rights are university professors. In Turkey, they are among the throngs of Turks fired or imprisoned for questioning Mr. Erdogans policies. Mr. Orban is also trying to shut down Budapests Central European University for having received funding from Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros. Academics and intellectuals are an anathema to populists because of their ivory-tower reputations, liberal values and claims to expert knowledge that all run in contrast to the will of the people.

All populists eventually turn on traditional media, because those who bring to light abuses of power are in effect enemies of the people. To go around the filtered media, they relish using fiery public speeches, social media, talk radio and pulpits that do not censor or, even more of a threat, try to analyze their words.

Polands government has already replaced management of state television and radio with people who follow its doctrine, firing hundreds of journalists who refused to accept government censorship. Turkey has shut down more than 100 media organizations for challenging Mr. Erdogan. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has limited press access to officials and spokespeople while the President himself attempts to de-legitimize American press by calling them fake news organizations.

Elected populist leaders have clearly signalled their intentions: to undermine liberal democratic institutions. And Mr. Trumps speech in Warsaw was no exception to the rhetoric of populists across the globe. Make no mistake: these are not just harmless words; they set the stage for a dangerous future if unchallenged.

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From Trump to Erdogan, beware the populist prescription - The ... - The Globe and Mail

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Abdulkadir Geylani Mosque, Sincan, Ankara, photographed in 2016 by Norman Behrendt

Erdogan is ordering the construction of mosques much as Suleiman the Magnificent once gave orders to Mimar Sinan. But as Bozdogan points out, there were many styles of mosques throughout the Ottoman Empire; in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries...Erdogan, however, sees such 18th- and 19th-century mosques as a contamination, not purely Turkish like the mosques of the 16th century. NYT Magazine

Suzy H. Hansen visits Turkey, where Erdogans AK Party and TOKI (the national housing commission) have overseen aboom in construction and urban re/development. Including of houses of worship designed to reference a "golden age" ofTurkish identity, while also furthering the Islamicizationof the country and providing an ongoing economic engine.

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Erdogan's neo-Ottoman mosques - Archinect

Istanbul: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had separate meetings in Istanbul with visiting US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as the two NATO allies are sharply divided over Syria.

The top Turkish and US officials did not make any statement to the press prior to their meeting on Sunday, but the state-run Anadolu Agency said the latest developments in Syria, counter-terrorism efforts and the Qatar row dominated their discussions, Xinhua news agency reported.

Turkey, annoyed at US continued arming of the Syrian Kurdish militia and involving them in the battle for Raqqa, the stronghold of the Islamic State group in Syria, has been reportedly making preparations for a military offensive against Afrin, a Kurdish-held canton in northwestern Syria.

Erdogan had a closed-door meeting with Tillerson on Sunday evening, Turkish media said.

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Recep Tayyip Erdogan holds meeting with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over Qatar row, Syria - Firstpost