Turkey: After Two-Year Purge, State of Emergency to be Lifted

Local Editor

Turkey's state of emergency, imposed after the failed 2016 coup, is to end Wednesday but the opposition fears it will be replaced by even more repressive legislative measures.

Earlier, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared the state of emergency on July 20, 2016, five days after warplanes bombed Ankara and bloody clashes broke out in Istanbul in a doomed putsch bid that claimed 249 lives.

The measure, which normally lasts three months but was extended seven times, has seen the detention of some 80,000 people and about double that number sacked from jobs in public institutions.

The biggest purge of Turkey's modern history has targeted not just alleged supporters of Fethullah Gulen, the US-based preacher blamed for the coup, but also Kurdish activists and leftists.

Meanwhile, former leaders of the opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party [HDP] -- Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas -- are still languishing in jail following their arrest in November 2016 on charges of links to Kurdish militants.

During last month's presidential election campaign, which he won, Erdogan pledged that the state of emergency would end. 

And it will -- at 1:00 am on Thursday, simply by virtue of the government not asking that it be extended. 

But the opposition has been angered by the government's submission of new legislation to parliament that apparently seeks to formalize some of the harshest aspects of the emergency.

The bill, dubbed "anti-terror" legislation by pro-government media, will be discussed at commission level on Thursday and then in plenary session on Monday.

The main opposition Republican People's Party [CHP] said the new measures would amount to a state of emergency on their own.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team