Erdogan threatens lives of political opponents by lowering assigned security

Mohamed Abdelghaffar

Turkey has suddenly decided to lower the security assigned to former prime minister Ahmet Davudoğlu as the Turkish President is pursuing various methods to oppress his opponents.

A statement by the Turkish Interior Ministry claimed the decision was taken because Davudoğlu “currently has nothing to threat his life.”

This decision came in vaiolation to Turkish laws that stipulate the necessity of assigning security to former prime ministers throughout the day, and whenever they are.

This coincided with a lawsuit filed by the Future Party (FP), led by Ahmet Davudoğlu, to object decisions by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality to increase public transport fares by 35 percent and the fee for vehicles using an undersea highway tunnel in Istanbul by 56 percent.

The new Turkish centre-right political party founded by the former prime minister, Davutoğlu, rapidly gained popularity across Turkey, the matter which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not expect.

This method has become a well-known tactic by the AK Party to terrorize its opponents; in 2019, after an Istanbul court sentenced the chair of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Canan Kaftancıoğlu, to over nine years in prison for charges including insulting the president on social media, assigned security was significantly lowered, allowing her to get assaulted later on by an AK Party supporter in April 2019.

The Justice and Development Party and its institutions carried out a series of assassinations, including the death of U.S. journalist Serena Shim, who worked for Press TV, and reported to have died in a car accident while returning to her hotel in Turkey after leaving the strategically important Syrian town of Kobani.

Following the violent coup attempt of July 2016 in which 250 people died, Erdogan’s government immediately blamed the Fetullah Gülen movement, which Turkey deems a terrorist organisation, and whose leader lives in self-imposed exile in the Unites States.

Under the umbrella of emergency powers, anybody with alleged links to the Gülen network has since been swept by the ongoing purge, which most recently manifested in the call to arrest of 176 members of the armed forces in early January.

According to Turkey’s report, a state of emergency was declared “in order to ensure the continuity of the Turkish democracy and to protect the rule of law, rights and freedoms of (Turkey’s) citizens”.

However, critics of Erdogan’s  party say that the government used broader emergency powers, an end to which was postponed multiple times, in order to destroy political opposition.

Shim was murdered for competence in investigative journalism work, she was working on a story to expose he smuggling of the Daesh terrorists across the Turkish-Syrian border in trucks for international NGOs, before she was spotted by elements of the Turkish intelligence who shot her in December 2015