What's Behind Turkey's Coup & Purge?
By Brandon Turbeville - mintpressnews.com - Protesters hold a giant Turkish flag as they gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. Turkey's Interior Ministry has fired nearly 9,000 police officers, bureaucrats and others and detained thousands of suspected plotters following a foiled coup against the government, Turkey's state-run news agency reported Monday. Protesters hold a giant Turkish flag as they gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Monday, July 18, 2016. Turkey’s Interior Ministry has fired nearly 9,000 police officers, bureaucrats and others and detained thousands of suspected plotters following a foiled coup against the government, Turkey’s state-run news agency reported Monday.
Tagged under
The ’Splainer (as in, “You’ve got some ’splaining to do”) is an occasional feature in which RNS gives you everything you need to know about current events to help you hold your own at a cocktail party. (RNS) Turkey’s crackdown of those suspected in the failed July 15 military coup widens, with the firing of 492 people at its top Islamic authority. And Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is zeroing in on a Muslim cleric living in rural Pennsylvania, whom he accuses of masterminding the coup. Reclusive Turkish imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in a gated compound in the Poconos, denies involvement and disavows violence. Erdogan is pressuring the U.S. to extradite Gulen, but Secretary of State John Kerry, rejecting insinuations that the U.S. was involved in the coup, said it awaits a formal extradition request and proof of Gulen’s involvement. 
Had Turkey’s military succeeded in toppling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last Friday, by seizing and consolidating power, and the public acquiesced, how would the U.S. have reacted? Counterfactuals are, of course, impossible to game out. But that thought experiment shows the difficulty the U.S. might have faced trying to reconcile its interest in a stable Turkey with its commitment to a democratic one. The problem of reconciling U.S. values and interests isn’t limited to Turkey, though those issues might be at the fore this week; this pertains to several partners in the Middle East. 
Turkey's bloody coup attempt plotted by the Fetullah Terrorist Organization is not seen as a threat to democracy, according to an article written by American writer Steven Cook. The article published on Thursday in U.S.-based magazine The Atlantic, which is headlined "How Erdogan Made Turkey Authoritarian Again", overlooks the people's struggle to protect the country's democracy, rushing to the streets to stop the illegal coup attempt, but rather says it "would not have brought an end to Turkey’s democracy". The article claimed that only Turkey's ruling party's progress would have been lost, ignoring the fact that coup plotters bombed the Turkish parliament, a clear intention to harm the democratic functioning of the country. 
Elektrik Elektronik ve Hizmet İhracatçıları Birliği (TET) desteğiyle oluşturulan yazılım sektörü ticaret heyeti, ABD'ye gerçekleştirdiği ziyaret kapsamında 150 milyon dolarlık iş bağlantısı kurdu. Washingon, DC'deki ikili görüşmeleri New York merkezli TOA Consulting firmasının yaptığı toplantılarda, Türkiye'nin yazılım potansiyeli Amerikalı firmalara tanıtıldı. TET açıklamasına göre Birlik, Ekonomi Bakanlığı'nın Uluslararası Rekabetin Geliştirilmesi (UR-GE) Tebliği teşvikleri kapsamında hayata geçirdiği Yazılım Yurtdışı Pazarlama Takımı (Tetsoft) projesiyle yeni pazarlara açılmanın yolları arıyor. 
Turkey and the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization have signed a cooperation agreement aimed at supporting forestry in the Balkan and African countries. Turkey’s Forestry and Water Affairs Minister Veysel Eroglu and FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva signed the deal, which will provide $10 million for supporting forestry and controlling soil erosion and desertification, at Turkey’s Forestry and Water Affairs Ministry in Ankara on Wednesday.
ISLAMABAD - Founder of Pak-Turk Business Council Turgat Bayan Monday said that Turkey has planned to invest $1 billion during next three years in the communication, textile and automotive sectors in Pakistan. He said this while talking to chairman BoI M Zubair and apprised about the forthcoming investments from Turkey. Turgat Bayan stated that currently the FDI of Turkey in Pakistan is $370m and Turkey plans to invest $1 billion during the next three years in the communication, textile and automotive sectors. 
By Murat Guzel - Throughout the week, we have witnessed that the US media coverage of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey misrepresented a lot of the facts on the ground. The American public was presented with a sterilized and highly romanticized view of the protestors with almost no reference to very well-known hate-based ideological groups which capitalized on the opportunity for conflict. Moreover, a segment of the Turkish community in the United States sponsored an advertisement published by two major newspapers which further exploits the existing misunderstanding of the events. It is unfortunate to see that most of the information and commentary on these protests in Turkey suffers from a failure to understand Turkish politics and society, and therefore, misguides the American public opinion. 
ISTANBUL, Turkey —Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan returned to Turkey on Friday morning in a defiant mood, calling for an end to the anti-government protests that have rocked the nation during the last week. In a speech from atop an open-air bus to thousands of supporters, Erdogan, back from a four-day trip to North Africa, said, "These protests must end immediately." "No power but Allah can stop Turkey's rise," continued Erdogan during an address to the scores of Justice and Development Party faithful who had gathered at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, according to local news reports. 
As protests have rocked Turkey over the past few days, three Turkish professionals in the U.S. decided on Sunday that they had to take some action. Turning to their technology backgrounds, the trio launched a crowd-sourced fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to buy a full-page ad in the front section of the New York Times in support of their fellow Turkish citizens who’ve clashed with the government across dozens of cities. In just a matter of hours, they’d jump-started the fastest major politics funding campaigns in Indiegogo’s history. 
