Long arm of Turkey’s anti-Gülenist purge

Hundreds of miles away from the turmoil of his native country, Mustafa Emre Çabuk did not expect to become ensnared in Turkey’s ever-expanding purge.

Çabuk, a principal at a Turkish school in neighboring Georgia, had no intention of returning home after spending more than a decade in the Caucasus. But Turkey’s government had other plans.

On a Wednesday morning in May — the day after Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım met his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Kvirikashvili — the Tbilisi police came knocking on Çabuk’s door to detain him. Ankara had requested his extradition to put him on trial for terrorism.

Since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to “cleanse” his country of its enemies following last year’s attempted coup, Turkey’s purge has gradually expanded beyond its own borders.

Within Turkey, more than 55,000 citizens have been jailed over links to the U.S.-based imam Fethullah Gülen, whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating the failed coup. At the same time, Turkey’s mission to eradicate Gülen’s influence has taken on global dimensions — an effort government officials describe as increasingly important.

“The ultimate target for the Turkish government is to bring persons with ties to the failed coup attempt and/or the Gülenist terrorist organization back home to face trial because the whole nation, especially the families of the 250 people killed and the thousands of casualties, expects the government to judge them,” Yunus Akbaba, an advisor to Yildirim, told POLITICO.

Hundreds of Turks accused of links to Gülen fled abroad after the coup attempt, but the exiled cleric’s secretive movement — which Ankara has classified as a terror organization — also has a long history of activity abroad, running a vast network of schools, universities, charities, media outlets and businesses around the world.

“This organization somehow managed to take their members out of Turkey before and after the coup,” said Akbaba. As long as fugitive Gülen suspects remained free, Turkey could not achieve real results in its fight against the movement, he added.

Among Western countries, Turkey’s pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears, much to Erdoğan’s dismay. The president has repeatedly lashed out at Europe and the U.S. for refusing to extradite Gülen and his followers.

Elsewhere, Ankara has had more luck. In May, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia handed Gülen suspects over to Turkey; several countries have shut down schools linked to Gülen after coming under pressure from the Turkish government.

Guilty by association

Mustafa Emre Çabuk’s school, the Demirel College in Tbilisi, remains open for now. But earlier this year, the Georgian government closed down Çabuk’s old workplace, another Gülen-linked school in the Black Sea resort of Batumi.

Turkey invariably charges all Gülen supporters with membership of a terrorist organization, even if the case relies on guilt by association. Çabuk was no exception.

Given the serious allegations, he was sentenced to three months in pre-extradition detention on May 25. Georgia denied his request for asylum; later in August, he will appear before a judge to fight his extradition.

“Facing a terror charge requires getting involved in a terror act,” said his wife Tuba. She insisted her husband had committed no such crime. Ankara’s charge partially rests on the allegation that Çabuk aided a Demirel College shareholder in selling shares to a U.S.-based institution believed to have links to Gülen.

Fearing for her husband’s safety, Tuba Çabuk hopes the Georgian government will deny Turkey’s request. “People are being unjustly jailed there and they face torture,” she said of her home country. “If my husband is returned to Turkey, he will face serious problems.”

Amnesty International has called on Georgia — which aspires to join the European Union — not to extradite Çabuk, citing “risk of torture or other ill-treatment, unfair trial or other serious human right violations.” But much is at stake for Tbilisi: Turkey is Georgia’s largest trade partner.

In Turkey itself, cases like Çabuk’s generate little sympathy. The Gülen movement’s wealth, coupled with its interlinked structure and its decades-long infiltration of the Turkish state, have led some critics to liken it to a mafia organisation.

The movement’s supporters, on the other hand, claim it is a peaceful, loosely connected group advocating liberal Islam. In many countries, their schools and colleges enjoy a good reputation. But most Turks, both government supporters and opponents, regard the Gülen movement with suspicion.

Missing in Malaysia

While attempting to coax countries into shutting down schools and extraditing suspects, Turkey has found other ways of making life abroad more difficult for Gülenists.

Ankara has cancelled numerous passports, a strategy that came to international attention in May when Enes Kanter, a player in the NBA, the American professional basketball league, was detained at a Romanian airport after Turkey annulled his travel documents. Kanter has been openly supportive of Gülen.

And while the Turkish government has so far pursued legal avenues to return suspected Gülenists, family members of two Turkish citizens deported from Malaysia have accused Ankara of circumventing international law entirely.

In October last year, Kamuran Tıbık reported her husband missing in Kuala Lumpur. Tamer Tıbık, a Turkish businessman with links to Gülen, failed to return home from a language course and did not answer calls.

The Tıbık family had relocated to the Malaysian capital a year earlier, unnerved by the Turkish government’s crackdown on Gülen-linked businesses, which preceded the current purge. Thousands of miles from Ankara, they felt safe.

But on October 13, Tamer Tıbık was nowhere to be found. His wife and friends looked for him in hospitals and police stations, to no avail. Tıbık’s neighbour Alettin Duman, described by Ankara as the “imam” or local leader of the Gülen movement in Malaysia, was also missing.

Two days later, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, the Turkish foreign minister, announced that Malaysia had handed over “terrorists” upon Turkey’s request. “Our fight against them will continue till the end, both inland and abroad,” he said.

“His passport was still at home. We understood then that he was abducted,” Kamuran Tıbık said. Çavuşoğlu’s speech struck her as surreal: “My husband is a kind man, but they talked as if they’d captured Pablo Escobar.”

Terrified, she fled Malaysia with her daughters three days after her husband’s disappearance. They have since been granted asylum; she has asked for the country to be withheld out of concern for her family’s safety.

For weeks, they had no information about her husband’s whereabouts, until her mother-in-law located Tamer in a detention centre in Ankara. In a letter, he told his wife that his kidnappers took him to a forest in Malaysia, where they interrogated and tortured him.

From Duman’s mother, Kamuran Tıbık heard the maltreatment continued after the men arrived in Turkey: “She said they were tortured in a gym hall for some weeks. They beat them and denied them food.” With their case ongoing, they remain in jail.

Akbaba, the Turkish prime minister’s adviser, denied Turkey had taken illegal action, claiming that Ankara had cancelled Tıbık and Duman’s passports and Malaysia had deported them for staying in the country illegally.

“Claims that Turkey uses illegal methods or acts underhandedly to extradite suspects are total nonsense,” he said. “If it were the case, the number of members of the Gülenist terror organization extradited to Turkey would not be just a few.”

“Even though we are not happy with our allies’ attitudes on this — indeed, there has been no extradition from the U.S. or most European allies up until now — we never apply any outlawed methods,” added Akbaba. “Torture is a serious crime and we are strictly against it.”

‘No court hearing, nothing’

Tıbık and Duman were not the only Turks the Malaysian government handed over to Ankara; in May, three other Turkish citizens accused of links to Gülen — an academic, a teacher and a businessman — were also deported.

The academic, İsmet Özçelik, had left Turkey shortly after the coup attempt and moved to Kuala Lumpur, where his elder son taught at a Gülen-linked school. In early May, while in a car with his son and others, they were stopped and he was taken by a group of unidentified men.

Two days earlier, two other Turkish citizens were kidnapped in a similar fashion, according to their lawyers. The Malaysian interior minister subsequently said they had been detained for connections to Islamic State, while the Turkish pro-government media identified them as terrorists linked to Gülen. The trio were deported a week later.

“There was no court hearing in Malaysia, nothing,” said Suat Özçelik, Ismet’s younger son, who worked at the flagship pro-Gülen newspaper Zaman before fleeing Turkey last year. He added that his father was listed as a person of concern by the United Nations Refugee Agency in Malaysia. (UNHCR did not respond to requests for confirmation.)

Suat and other members of the Özçelik family have applied for asylum in a European country, but he requested that their whereabouts be kept secret. Even in Europe, he does not feel safe from the long arm of the Turkish state.

He has cause to worry. In early August, Spanish police stopped Hamza Yalçin, a writer for a leftist Turkish magazine, at Barcelona airport and detained him pending extradition.

Yalcin, who emigrated to Sweden in 1984, has no known connections to Gülen, but is sought by Turkey for alleged links to the far-left terror group DHKP/C, according to Spanish media. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called for his immediate release.

*Editor’s note: Hizmet Movement Blog reaffirms its non-endorsement policy of the various viewpoints expressed throughout the articles that are solely shared for the convenience of the readers.

Published on Politico, 21 August 2017, Monday