Erdogan’s Subtle Starvation Policy Against Purge Victims
By: Abdullah Ayasun
Tags: Khk, Turkey, State Of Emergency, Starvation, Erdogan

Erdogan’s Subtle Starvation Policy Against Purge Victims

Unlike the Assad regime’s brutal starvation sieges of rebel-held territories, Ankara has developed, through micromanagement, a subtle policy of condemning purge victims to penury.

(Photo Credit: Kronos).

In the past week, law enforcement forces raided 40 addresses in Salihli, Turgutlu, Alaşehir, Köprübaşı, Kula ve Sarıgöl, all of which are districts of Turkey’s western province of Manisa, detaining 33 people and arresting 10. Their crime was, according to prosecutors, “helping families of people who were imprisoned in the post-coup clampdown” by essentially providing food products!

The news normally may not qualify for a front-page story in the mundane and banal climate of Turkey’s post-coup repression. But, from the point of what it reveals, it certainly deserves our attention in order to grasp the obscure and subtle nature of the government’s “starvation policy” against purge victims, something that went largely unnoticed both in national and international media.

For those wondering what life looks like for purge victims and families of imprisoned people in Turkey, this story offers a close-up view of the day-to-day struggle of thousands of people for survival in the face of an ocean of obstacles to make a decent living.

In the aftermath of the coup, more than 150,000 people have been expelled from their jobs without due process during the emergency rule. The majority of them are unable to find gainful employment either in the public or private sector. What is more remarkable is the fact that the authorities intimidate most of the employers not to hire purge victims, dealing a double blow to their livelihoods. This is one way the government condemns purge victims to starvation, a fact which a pro-government journalist unabashedly confirmed as “social death.”

The police operations to intimidate -by arrest- mostly Gulen-linked people who help families of imprisoned ones by providing them some material means of living seems to be the other, less known and more morally suspect method: hundreds of people have been rounded up for their acts of benevolence, as being a good Samaritan is considered a transgression. Take the case of Halime Gulsu. She was arrested in Mersin for helping families of jailed people and later died in prison due to her deteriorating health.

Police conducted similar operations all across the country. In January 2019, 11 women in the southern province of Maras were sent to jail over helping other women whose husbands had previously been imprisoned as part of the post-coup crackdown. N.O. became a victim of her generosity when she shared some of her hard-won money with a victim family. She and her friends were captured by the police while they were assembling packages of foods to be sent to needy families.

Although a “first” in Turkish political history(see the note below), Stalin’s and Hitler’s merciless regimes are the most well-known progenitors of starvation policy in modern history. Considerably worse in terms of the number of people this policy affected, the people of conscience under these regimes who wanted to aid the victims either by hiding them, feeding them or smuggling them across the borders faced immediate execution. In the 21st century, the Assad regime’s notorious starvation policy worked through the Syrian military’s sieges of some populated areas within the rebel territory and cutting their lifeline to the flow of food supplies.

The crackdown on those who try to help purge victims and families of imprisoned people under Erdogan’s regime is reminiscent of these brutal regimes of the past and present. The difference is more of a degree than substance. Execution as a method of intimidation is replaced by arrests which are made to look “legal.” Unlike Assad’s, the Erdogan government’s selective targeting does not confine itself to a certain geographical area to impose its starvation policies against a cluster of selected people. Rather, the Turkish policy is designed to isolate, alienate and marginalize the targeted people from the rest of the society, cutting their lifelines and social ties to others while intimidating the social body against any form of engagement and solidarity with these unwanted elements of the body politic.

With this new policy, the Erdogan regime is playing a different punitive strategy with much more calculation and subtlety. Through the deployment of a diverse set of legal, political and economic tools, the government leaves no breathing space for the population it targets. This deliberate policy drives people into despondency and, as a recent report revealed, suicide.

The Ghettoization of Turkey’s Public Workers

For the legal aspect of this policy, a law from late last year could be shown as an example that reveals the depth of the government’s denial of employment to purge victims.

The law, notoriously billed as Article 5, was about the status of doctors who were dismissed from public service. It envisaged blocking medical professionals from working in any capacity in the private or public sector on the grounds of “national security threats” or alleged terrorism links. However carefully scripted or coded, the language of the law was suffused with security terminology, mostly designed to conceal the real intention behind the government move. The depth and breadth of the new measure left no room for doctors or some of the new graduates from medical departments of universities suspected of even the slightest affiliation with Gulen Movement to work either in the public or private sector. The law not only completely shuts the door to the possibility of readmitting previously dismissed doctors to the profession, but also aims to kill off the medical career of new graduates, who are unable to pass an extensive security background check. If a student fails to pass the security screening — -a form of vetting process designed to find out whether medical students have any relatives dismissed by government decrees or anyone in the family under investigation — , his path of a medical career is practically over.

Only a week after the release of Amnesty International’s bleak report about Turkey’s dismissed public workers and their ever-worsening plight, the Turkish government, with this notorious law, showed its fixed determination to continue with such policies, which carry little sympathy or mercy for the victims. In fact, the president, well before the coup in July 2016, had vowed to deny even a glass of water for the members of the Movement. When women whose husbands were imprisoned after the coup went to the office of a mayor in a western Turkish city for asking financial assistance, the mayor rudely dismissed them. But the punch line came when he told them to go and eat “tree roots.” Taken together with the remarks of senior AKP officials and the president, it was not surprising altogether to see that the legal measure regarding doctors reflects a mindset deeply entrenched among the senior party leadership and the administration.

But the tragedy is not limited to doctors. Other public workers’ endless attempts have yielded no result given the shambolic workings of the commission — infamously dubbed as OHAL Commission — set up by the government to address complaints and demands of the sacked public servants. The commission only restored a few thousands of the dismissed to their jobs, while rejecting more than 100,000 applications, without offering no plausible legal ground for its decisions.

Majority of the applications have bogged down in lengthy and protracted processing of files. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), fearful of being overwhelmed by applications from Turkey, urges Turkish purge victims to exhaust domestic legal channels for remedy.

But by all indication, “domestic remedy” does not exist within the realm of possibility in Turkey’s current conditions. The shabby structure of the seven-member OHAL Commission and its “go-slow” policy have frustrated the dismissed workers who have grown disillusioned by the official indifference to their plight. The lack of job opportunities in the country has condemned them into abject poverty and even starvation. They are unable to travel abroad given the revocation of their passports. It is no coincidence that protesters labeled the last year’s ban on doctors and medical students as a death sentence.

The international community needs to reckon with an urgent reality playing out in plain sight in Turkey. It is that the government in Ankara simply condemns a certain segment of society, or the KHK people, into a path of protracted social death through the employment of non-violent methods. This is completely a new phenomenon and a new methodology that reveal the dexterity and shrewdness of the government. And only a concerted pressure and attentive media coverage would spur authorities into action. Otherwise, any change seems less possible given the fact that both the international community and the Turkish society are not even aware of what is going on.