The excellency, Mr. Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, filed a criminal complaint against another blogger with the claims of attacks to his personality with heavy insults. The charge is beyond travesty. Though it should not surprise anyone who is aware of business in Turkey these days. Attorney-generalship prosecutor O. Atalay, acted upon this legal complaint and indicted the 22 year old university student blogger for two years in prison. The poor blogger testified that he has not used any wording that would denigrate or attack Erdogan's personality. Indeed he said he used exactly the same phrase that Mr. Erdogan had uttered at one of his public speeches recently.
What did Mr. Erdogan say: "CHP and MHP (two other opposition parties) became soul-mates with Ocalan (PKK's leader in prision)". Lets see what 22 year old student said: "Just on the contrary, let me remind you that state and PKK's leader Ocalan had been in close contact recently, Erdogan is indeed a true soul-mate with Ocalan."
Link from a Turkish newspaper.
Wait, this is indeed nothing compared to the scores of intellectuals, writers, academicians, army officers held in prison for more than two years without a credible evidence against them on charges of organizing a coup attempt to topple government 10 years ago, namely, "Ergenekon" and "Balyoz" trials. They have not been proven guilty and so far all the hard evidence put forward by the police department is proven to be manufactured. Similar to this, a journalists from one of the many pro-government newspapers dumped a suitcase full of CDs and papers on a police station, which then found to be all created after the date of indictments upon criminal investigation. None of this is pursued by the Attorney-prosecutors who are indeed instantiated by the interior ministry that obviously belong to AKP. Yet the innocent victims of these false accusations are still held in prison, for more than two years. In Turkey, a person is guilty of charge until proving not guilty. Shouldn't this be the other way around in democracies.
This is the government of AKP, and its leader Mr. Erdogan praised by West on the accounts of progress in democracy and civil rights. (!)
....
Had Bill Maher had his show in Turkey, he'd most likely be indicted for life at best.
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