WikiLeaks boasts that it is preparing to dump hundreds of thousands of emails from the AKP, the political party of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and they are expecting a “fight,” even though they describe the documents as both helpful and harmful to AKP.
WikiLeaks anticipates that Turks will be blocked from viewing the documents by their government’s aggressive Internet censors, so they asked followers around the world to help “bypass censorship and push our links through the censorship to come.”
As for the “fight” from Turkey’s government that WikiLeaks was expecting, it looks like they got it:
Of course, one might expect the “power structure” of Turkey to have quite a few penciled-in corrections these days, as Erdogan carries out a massive purge in the wake of last weekend’s unsuccessful coup. The latest word from Turkish media is that Erdogan’s regime has “asked” all 1,577 university deans in the country to resign.
The new power structure is going to be a lot more Islamist than the old one exposed by the WikiLeaks data dump. The UK Independent warns Erdogan is using the coup to “justify a purge of state officials and army officers who do not give him total obedience, opening the door for him to establish an all-powerful presidency while seemingly Islamising Turkish society to a degree not seen since the fall of the Ottomans.”
“As pro-coup forces were rounded up over the weekend, there were parades of religious zealots in the streets chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as giant speakers in Taksim Square in central Istanbul blasted out verses from the Koran,” the Independent reports — a detail somewhat overlooked by most Western media coverage.
The Independent quotes several Turkish women who are afraid to go outside in the aftermath of the coup, for fear Islamist enforcers will judge their attire insufficiently modest and assault them. Those who might have resisted Erdogan’s Islamization program are fearful they might be labeled coup sympathizers, a fear reinforced by the public punishment and humiliation of the accused.
Turkey might have been doomed to an Islamist future no matter which way the coup went since Erdogan has accused his old nemesis, U.S.-based imam Fethullah Gulen, of masterminding the attempt to oust him from power. The Independent notes that Gulenists “ruthlessly led a witch hunt inside the army, with hundreds of officers removed or arrested, accused of plotting a coup that never existed” a decade ago, when they were allied with Erdogan. That witch hunt might have been taken by the Gulenists as an opportunity to seed the armed forces with their own loyalists, who now face a purge after their bid to overthrow Erdogan failed.
It will be interesting to learn if the WikiLeaks documents support any of the varying theories about the coup, such as speculation that Erdogan and AKP had lists of enemies drawn up before the attempt was even made and might even have staged or provoked the insurrection to make a society-altering purge possible.