Istanbul, Turkey, Oct 22 (EFE).- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed Tuesday to pursue «to the farthest corners of the world» the followers of Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish Islamist preacher who recently died in the United States, and whom Ankara blames for the failed 2016 coup.
“These traitors managed to escape Turkish justice thanks to the ones who protected them. They left without being held to account for the martyrs’ blood they shed. But they will not be able to escape divine justice,” Erdoğan said in a televised address, his first public reaction to the death Sunday of the 83-year-old theologian, who had lived in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999.
Erdoğan invoked the memory of the civilians killed in the failed coup, in which the cleric has always denied any involvement, and condemned «the notorious members of FETO,» an acronym for «Fethullah Terrorist Organization,» which is how Ankara began to describe the religious organization founded by Gülen after the coup.
«Whether in Turkey or the farthest corners of the world, we will be on the back of the FETO hyena pack,» the Turkish leader promised.
Since the outlawing of the movement, Ankara has frequently announced the «repatriation» of suspected supporters of Gülen, especially from Balkan countries, often after kidnapping them and boarding them extrajudicially on a plane, though sometimes with the help of local police officers.
In 2018, one such kidnapping led to the removal of several high-ranking officials in Kosovo.
From allies to rivals
Starting in the 1970s, Gülen created Hizmet, Turkish for «service», a community of sympathizers that became the main ally of Erdoğan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) after it won the 2002 elections.
Gülen’s followers formed semi-secret networks in the administration, the judiciary and the police, where they helped each other climb the ranks, initially in coordination with the AKP, to erode the power of secular forces and advance the Islamisation of Turkey.
In the first decade of the AKP’s rule, it was mainly Gülen’s supporters, generally well-educated academics fluent in English, who improved Erdoğan’s image in Europe and the United States and made it possible for the Islamist government to be accepted as moderate and made up of conservative democrats.
From 2013, however, the Gülen movement and Erdoğan’s party clashed in a power struggle that culminated in the designation of Hizmet as a terrorist organization in 2016 and the failed military coup of 15 July, which Ankara still attributes to Gülen supporters in the army, although the preacher has always denied any involvement.
The same pro-government Turkish press that just over a decade ago hailed Gülen as the mentor of a new, enlightened Islam with a global vocation is now reporting his death calling him the «chief traitor.»
Hizmet is banned and persecuted in Turkey and many of its assets have been confiscated, but it still runs numerous prep schools, foundations, radio stations, magazines and university lectures on several continents, estimated to be worth billions of dollars. EFE
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