Sultan’s fall: 31K Turks committed suicide during Erdogan’s era (Part 5)

Mahmoud al-Batakoushi

The despair, helplessness and ambiguity that hang over Turkish society thanks to the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) policies had been pushing the Turkish people to commit suicide. This is not the first time that the Turkish economy has suffered and the citizens paid the price for it through unemployment, poverty and inflation, but the narrow political horizon and the state of polarization that feeds the ruling regime, as well as the absence of a future, has been attributed to the exacerbation of this phenomenon.

According to the official Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), 31,000 Turks gave up their lives during the reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while the number of suicide attempts in the last five years reached 60,850 cases, 16,028 of whom died.

Therefore, the increase in mass suicides in Turkey in recent weeks is not surprising, as three Turkish families have collectively given up their lives as a result of their inability to meet their basic needs. Data from the General Administration of Social Aid of the Turkish Ministry of Family, Labor and Social Services indicated that the number of Turks that sought social aid in 2018 increased to about 3.5 million citizens, an increase of approximately 9.2% compared to 2017, while total social aid expenditures increased by about $1.25 billion in the same year. The contraction in the Turkish economy has also led to an increase in aid and the number of needy families in large proportions.

The series of mass suicides began with the suicide of four siblings who were living together in a house in the Fatih neighborhood in the heart of the European part of Istanbul, followed by the suicide of an entire family consisting of a couple and their two children in Antalya, in the south of the country, and then the suicide of a father and two sons in Istanbul.

In all these cases, the common denominator was depression due to the accumulation of debts and the inability to find work. The police and investigative agencies found the remnants of cyanide in the homes of the three families.

There is no doubt that the large-scale campaign that followed the fake coup that took place in July 2016 led to an increase in the number of suicides as a result of the Turkish regime dismissing thousands of employees, allegedly for their involvement in the coup. This was confirmed by Republican People’s Party (CHP) member Aykut Erdogdu, who pointed out that the number of citizens being prosecuted due to loan debts and credit card debts increased last April by 24% compared to the same month in 2018, adding that “under the ruling of the Justice and Development Party, people are borrowing to meet their basic needs.”

People’s Democratic Party (HDP) politicial Ayhan Bilgen noted that there were attempts to cover up suicides in the country, saying, “There are journalists who were arrested because they published news about the increase in suicides.”

The interesting thing is that the Turkish regime has settled with naive measures and justifications for the crisis, as the government has contented itself with making legislative amendments to prohibit the sale of products containing the toxic cyanide substance on the market and over the internet in the face of the suicides that have increased recently, ignoring the causes and motives of the real crisis. Meanwhile, the media close to the regime talk about various conspiracy theories behind those events and seek to list evidence to prove that the causes of suicides are not economic.

Erdogan’s regime ignores the language of numbers and logic, and it insists that the Turkish economy has epics and that inflation is declining, confirming that it lives in a virtual world that contradicts the facts.