There have been several dramatic aspects of Turkey’s creeping Islamization over the past 15 years. Anti-Semitism, xenophobia, an eroding secular social life and majoritarianism (that the majority in a society is entitled to primacy) are not all. The Islamization of Turkish society has also made life more difficult for women.

In 2015, Turkey ranked 130^th in gender equality among a group of 145 countries. But that was hardly surprising. Only a year earlier, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had objected to equality between men and women. “Women’s equality with men is against nature,” he said.

All this is in contrast to the secular principles Erdogan has long fought to undo. Turkish women won suffrage as early as 1934, 25 years before Swiss women won the same right. Now, 82 years after winning the right to vote, Turkish women had to hear their president, Erdogan, offering them “Turkish-style” women’s rights. “We don’t necessarily have to express, defend and implement women’s rights in the format and style that exists in the West,” Erdogan commented.

Erdogan is not alone in thinking that a woman’s best role should be as a mother. His wife, Turkey’s First Lady, Emine Erdogan, shocked many people when she said that the Ottoman-era harems were “educational centers that prepared women for life.”

That being the mindset of Turkey’s most powerful man, life for modern Turkish women, especially those who dissent about anything, would become harder.

In May a Turkish court sentenced a journalist, Ms. Arzu Yildiz, to 20 months in jail for showing video footage of arms shipments in trucks apparently operated by Turkish intelligence and carrying a cargo of weapons bound for various Islamist groups in Syria. Erdogan has been particularly sensitive about the film and claimed that searching the trucks and some of the media coverage of it were part of a plot by his political enemies to undermine him and embarrass Turkey.

The case against the journalist, Yildiz, however, marked a legal peculiarity in addition to her sentence. In May, Yildiz was sentenced to 20 months in prison and deprived of parental rights over her children for exposing the proceedings of the trial.

President Erdogan has insisted that the vehicles were carrying humanitarian aid and accused the prosecutors of “treason and espionage,” as well as of being agents of his US-based nemesis Fethullah Gulen.

The prosecutors were arrested and put on trial in a closed court session, before being sentenced to prison terms. Yildiz obtained video of the proceedings, however, and posted the prosecutors’ testimonies, which contradicted the government’s claims, on YouTube.

“Nobody can take my children away from me… not even the Sultan himself, let alone the court,” Yildiz told Can Erzincan TV.

The court also stripped Yildiz of legal rights over her children for breaching the confidentiality of the court case. The ruling said the journalist would be deprived of legal guardianship of her children, invoking an article in Turkey’s penal code. The decision meant she would not be able to register her children in school, open bank accounts for them or take them abroad alone, and could only do so in conjunction with their father.

A Turkish court sentenced journalist Arzu Yildiz to 20 months in jail for publishing a video that showed Turkish intelligence agents shipping weapons to Islamist groups in Syria. The court also stripped Yildiz of legal guardianship over her own children, for breaching the confidentiality of the court case.

But — even according to official narrative — women may face worse tragedies in Erdogan’s Turkey. The head of a department of the Supreme Court of Appeals has revealed that nearly 3,000 marriages were registered between the victims of sexual abuse, including rape, and their assailants. Speaking to a parliamentary commission, the senior judge testified that children between the ages of five and 18 could be subjected to sexual abuse in the country, and that girls between the ages of 12 and 15 were more easily tricked by abusers. The judge mentioned a particular case in which three men kidnapped and raped a girl, then one of them married her and the sentences for all three were lifted. Marriage proposals, Turkish style.

Instead of passing legislation to amend grotesque sections of the penal code, Erdogan keeps doing “family engineering” in line with his Islamist thinking. Most recently, Erdogan told a women’s association that childless women were “deficient, incomplete.” He said that “rejecting motherhood was giving up on humanity” and that “family planning and contraception were not for Muslim families.”

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, struggled hard to grant Turkish women what their Western peers enjoyed in more civilized parts of the world. Erdogan is now busy undoing the legacy of Ataturk, which had once produced proud, Western-thinking Turkish women.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Reading his public speeches, one may think that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan must be joking; that he is a celebrity stand-up comedian, the best in his profession. In reality, he is not joking. He believes in what he says. And he does not want to make people laugh. He is just an Islamist strongman.

Visiting Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in the first week of November for the opening of a mosque in a dictatorial country where there are 100,000 Muslims, Erdogan accused Western Europe for “intolerance that spreads like the plague.”

Erdogan described Belarus, which Western countries describe as a dictatorship, as “a country in which people with different roots live in peace.” In Erdogan’s view Belarus is decent and peaceful, but Western Europe is not. Merely because Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, agreed to open a mosque to lure some Turkish investment.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk on November 11, 2016. (Image source: TRT Haber video screenshot)

Back in Turkey, things look very Belarusian — even worse — rather than Western European, a culture Erdogan despises.

In August, an Istanbul court ordered Asli Erdogan, a prominent author and journalist, arrested on charges of membership in an armed terror organization. Asli Erdogan, a peace activist and novelist, worked for Ozgur Gundem, a pro-Kurdish newspaper. She has remained in prison since her arrest. The prosecutors demand an aggravated life sentence plus 17.5 years in jail for her.

How did Asli Erdogan the novelist “support terror”? This is from the indictment: “… in an understanding of a novelist [the accused] portrayed terrorists as citizens in her columns.” The prosecutor’s “evidence” is four columns by Asli Erdogan. Mehmet Yilmaz, a columnist, suggested that Turkish law faculties, after this indictment, should be closed down and converted into imam schools.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on dissent goes at full speed. An opposition, pro-Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, announced that it would suspend its legislative activity after a dozen of its lawmakers, including its co-chairpersons, were arrested on terror charges. Meanwhile Erdogan accuses Europe of abetting terrorism by supporting Kurdish militants as the Turkish government tries to suppress them. He said: “Europe, as a whole, is abetting terrorism.”

German lawmakers, including leading representatives of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party, announced an initiative to “adopt” their Turkish colleagues after Erdogan’s government rescinded the legal immunity of 53 of 59 Kurdish members of parliament and arrested dozens of lawmakers, party employees and journalists.

“In the history of the program, there has never been such an extraordinary situation where I think we can say that a democracy is threatening to turn itself into a dictatorship,” said German Social Democratic lawmaker and human rights expert Frank Schwabe. “We have a lot of Turkish opposition parliamentarians under threat, so we had to apply the parliamentary sponsorship program in an extraordinary way.”

In another speech, Erdogan said that Turkey was ready to abandon its EU candidacy if “Europe told us they do not want us.” He said he would put EU membership to referendum. It may look amusing if an applicant threatens to withdraw his application to a club he knows and declares he does not belong to. But the incompatibility between the democratic cultures of Western Europe and Turkey are now too visible to ignore or tone down in diplomatic language.

There are signs, albeit weak, in Europe that Islamist Turkey does not belong to the Old Continent. Austria’s defense minister, Hans Peter Doskozil, told the German daily, Bild, that “Turkey is on its way to becoming a dictatorship.” Past perfect tense instead of present may have described Turkey’s case better, but there is a European “awakening” on Turkish affairs.

Austria’s foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, said: “Over recent years Turkey has moved farther and farther away from the EU, but our policy has remained the same. That can’t work. What we need are clear consequences.” He is right: “That” cannot work.

A tiny EU state was bolder in calling a cat a cat. Speaking of Erdogan’s increasingly savage crackdown on dissidents, particularly after the failed coup of July 15, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, said: “These are methods, one must say this bluntly, that were used during Nazi rule … And there has been a really, really bad evolution in Turkey since July that we as the European Union cannot simply accept.”

Europe’s unpleasant game of pretension with Turkey should end at once, with Brussels and Ankara admitting that the planned marriage was an awfully bad idea from the beginning; that Turkey does not belong to Europe, as its leader proudly says, and that there are better formats to frame diplomatic relationships than lies, cheap lies and cheaper lies. Let Turkey go on its voyage to become another peaceful Belarus.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

In 1853, John Russell quoted Tsar Nicholas I of Russia as saying that the Ottoman Empire was “a sick man — a very sick man,” in reference to the ailing empire’s fall into a state of decrepitude. Some 163 years after that, the modern Turkish state follows in the Ottoman steps.

Turkey, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule, was staggering between a hybrid democracy and bitter authoritarianism. After the failed putsch of July 15, it is being dragged into worse darkness. The silly attempt gives Erdogan what he wanted: a pretext to go after every dissident Turk. A witch-hunt is badly shattering the democratic foundations of the country.

Taking advantage of the putsch attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that will run for a period of three months, with an option to extend it for another quarter of a year. Erdogan, declaring the state of emergency, promised to “clean out the cancer viruses like metastasis” in the body called Turkey. With the move for a state of emergency, Turkey also suspended the European Convention on Human Rights, citing Article 15 of the Convention, which stipulates:

“In time of war or other public emergencies threatening the life of the nation, any High Contracting Party may take measures derogating from its obligations under this Convention to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation, provided that such measures are not inconsistent with its other obligations under international law.”

Before July 15, civil liberties in Turkey were de facto in the deep freeze. Now they are de jure in the deep freeze.

On July 27, the Turkish military purged 1,684 officers, including 149 generals, on suspicion that they had links with Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Muslim cleric who once was Erdogan’s staunchest political ally but is now his biggest nemesis and the suspected mastermind of the coup attempt. On the same day, the government closed down three news agencies, 16 television stations, 23 radio stations, 45 newspapers, 15 magazines and 29 publishers on the same charges. Two days before those actions, warrants were issued for 42 journalists, as a part of an investigation against members of the “Fethullah [Gulen] terrorist organization.”

Turkish police escort dozens of handcuffed soldiers, who are accused of participating in the failed July 15 coup d’état. (Image source: Reuters video screenshot)

Under the state of emergency, it is dangerous in Turkey even to question whether July 15 was a fake coup orchestrated or tolerated by Erdogan for longer-term political gains. Turkish prosecutors are investigating people who allege on social media that the coup attempt was in fact a hoax. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said that: “Anyone who suggests the coup attempt was staged ‘likely had a role’ in the insurrection.” But there is more.

In a massive purge, the government sacked more than 60,000 civil servants from the military, judiciary, police, schools and academia, including 1,577 faculty deans who were suspended. More than 10,000 people have been arrested, and there are serious allegations of torture. Witnesses told Amnesty International that captured military officers were raped by police, hundreds of soldiers were beaten, and some detainees were denied food, water and access to lawyers for days. Turkish authorities also arrested 62 children and accused them of treason. The youngsters, aged 14 to 17, were from Kuleli Military School in Istanbul. The students have reportedly been thrown in jail and are not allowed to speak to their parents.

The witch-hunt is not in the governmental sector only. Several Turkish companies have fired hundreds of personnel suspected of having links with Gulen. Turkish Airlines, Turkey’s national airline, fired 211 employees, including a vice-general manager and a number of cabin crew members.

Sadly, Turks had to choose between two unpleasant options: military dictatorship and elected dictatorship. The good news is that the coup attempt failed and Turkey is not a third-world dictatorship run by an unpredictable military general who loves to crush dissent. The bad news is that Turkey is run by an unpredictable, elected president who loves to crush dissent.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Is there any other person you trust to decide which ideas and speech you are entitled to hear — or which are too dangerous for you to hear?

Is there any other person you think should have the ability to decide what criticism of the Government is respectful enough?

Would you cede your autonomy to decide what you to hear to a Government? Probably not.

The Turkish government does not agree. Evidently Turkey’s AKP Government in Ankara believes it is fit to be this authority, and not just domestically. Its urge to censor negative press seems to be going global.

The Government of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara recently summoned the German ambassador to demand the deletion of a satirical music video which highlighted his government’s aggression against the Kurdish people, his brutal repression of protestors, and his weak position on equal rights for women. Turkey also insisted that a German comedian be prosecuted under an obscure German law for insulting the leader of a foreign country.

Turkey seems to be spending more time policing the image of Erdogan abroad than the serious security situation it is facing.

Turkey’s latest authoritarian crackdown on the rights of its citizens to freedom of expression should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the country’s path towards an increasingly Islamist, authoritarian government.

Erdogan’s renowned thin-skinned government has, in the past two years, opened at least 1,845 cases over insults to the president, such as, for instance, comparing the president to Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

Last year, Dr. Bilgin Ciftci of Turkey posted photos on Twitter juxtaposing President Erdogan with the fictional character Gollum. Ciftci was immediately fired from the hospital where he worked. Then he was brought to court for insulting Erdogan, an offense punishable by up to four years in prison.

In March, a court placed the newspaper Zaman in the control of state administrators, with no clear reason given, arguably breaching Article Three of the European Convention of Human Rights:

“2. Everyone charged with a criminal offence has the following minimum rights:

“(a) to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him;”

Zaman has apparently never received information of the charges against it, or the reason for the court order placing its activities and infrastructure under state control — moves breaching further sections of Article 3, which specify the right to be able to “construct a defence”. Without knowing what charges it faces, Zaman is unable to do that.

In addition, Turkey’s World Press Freedom Index ranking has plummeted to 149 out of 180: below Zimbabwe (131) and Burundi (145).

Turkey also continues to imprison possibly the highest number of journalists of any nation — according the Committee to Protect Journalists, the assessed number is 14 out of 199, worldwide. Other sources claim the number is closer to 30, and still others suggest that Turkey has had the greatest number of incarcerated journalists globally.

Whatever the true number, it is shameful that a NATO member, pledged to uphold the values of democracy as a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), ranks among some of the worst abusers of press freedom, including Iran, China and Saudi Arabia.

The Turkish government led by Erdogan seems to be undergoing a public transformation into an increasingly totalitarian state. Turkey has been abandoning the pro-Western principles of Kemalism and pivoting, with a more oppressive and expansionist outlook, toward Ottoman Islam.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was willing and overtly “proud’ to show solidarity with the massacred Charlie Hebdo satirists in Paris by joining the Marche Republicaine against those who would attack freedom of speech. At home, however, Davutoglu pursues a domestic agenda that not only infringes upon media freedom, but also on the freedoms of individual citizens in fundamental breaches of ECHR legislation. Davutoglu, for example, has suggested women being equal to men causes suicides.

Turkey has also attempted, during Erdogan’s period of governance, to ban both Twitter — for “incit[ing] political dissent” — and YouTube — for “promot[ing] the act of religious defamation (article 216).” Erdogan blocked Twitter during responses to terror attacks and public protests, and attempted to quell any protest against his government.

Under the pretense of “counter terrorism,” Erdogan has repeatedly been attempting to strangle the channels of discussion and the organizing of protests.

In any state claiming that protests are linked to terrorism and blasphemy is unjustifiable. These are classic intimidatory tactics. They illustrate why the West must begin to criticize Erdogan’s regime to a greater extent on its infringement on freedom of speech, rather than to make deals with it.

Had Charlie Hebdo been a Turkish publication, its material would most likely have been branded illegal or brought under state control: it would likely no longer exist.

Despite the ruling by Turkey’s judiciary that Erdogan could not eliminate access to Twitter, he nevertheless continues to advance his agenda of censorship.

This position Erdogan holds, of branding opposition to his regime as blasphemy, creates a religious divide between those who are “pure” and those who are “dangerous.” Further, as mentioned, the notion that an idea is too politically toxic to be discussed contravenes the principles of free speech and freedom of expression that Turkey pledged as a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights.

Turkey’s lurch to establish its government as some form of unassailable authority beyond questioning again breaches the ECHR, this time Article 9:

“1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance. “

Turkey is also likely to fall afoul of Article 10 of the ECHR:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”

Turkey’s blocking of social media, which targets communication with the outside world, also clearly infringes on the “regardless of frontiers” stipulation.

And finally, Turkey’s actions are also clearly in breach of Article 11

“Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

The European Union and the liberal democracies have remained silent on Turkey’s aggressive campaign against civil liberties. But it is time to stop betraying Turkish liberals, democrats and Kurdish people facing persecution for their views — before it comes “soon to a theater near you.”

Countries in the West sometimes seem to fantasize that Turkey, with half of Istanbul in Europe, can therefore can modernized, be become progressive and work with the West.

They distance themselves and turn a blind eye to the Turkish government’s assaults on human rights. Before Turkey is capitulated to even further, or again considered for membership in the European Union, shining a serious light on the country seems long overdue.

Robbie Travers, a political commentator and consultant, is Executive Director of Agora, former media manager at the Human Security Centre, and a law student at the University of Edinburgh.