The “Great Turkish Purge” launched by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist, autocratic government in the aftermath of a coup attempt in July surprised many in its size. It should not have done. The failed putsch gave Erdogan’s government a golden opportunity to advance his crackdown on dissent of every kind. No wonder Erdogan, on the night of the attempt, said: “This [coup attempt] is a gift of God”.

In its annual “Freedom in the World” report, entitled “Populists and Autocrats: The Dual Threat to Global Democracy,” the Washington-based Freedom House said on January 31 that Turkey suffered the largest decline in freedoms among 195 countries over the past year. Turkey’s aggregate score declined 15 points to 38 out of 100 (the most free) — from having been in 53^rd place in the 2016 report. It did manage to maintain its “partly free” status for “freedoms” together with 59 other countries. “[A]n attempted coup in July… led the government to declare a state of emergency and carry out mass arrests and firings of civil servants, academics, journalists, opposition figures, and other perceived enemies,” the report said.

Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz said that a total of 33,065 personnel have been dismissed from his ministry, most of them teachers, educators and administrative staff. Of those purged, 3,855 have been detained on charges of “terrorism”.

Qualitatively speaking, the situation at Turkish universities is no better. Most university presidents, appointed by Erdogan, staunchly ally with his party politics and dismiss academics they view as “Erdogan’s political adversaries.”

In the aftermath of a military coup d’état on September 12, 1980 (the third time the military took over in modern Turkish history), the generals issued decree no. 1402, dismissing a total of 120 scholars from the universities. By comparison, on February 7, Turkey’s “civilian” government issued a decree purging 330 scholars from universities. Erdogan’s public sector purge now amounts to around 100,000 officials, including nearly 5,000 university scholars. In other words, Erdogan’s academic purge is 38 times bigger in size than the generals’ after the 1980 coup. According to data compiled by Turkey Purge, PEN International, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Stockholm Center for Freedom, 128,398 people have been sacked, while 91,658 are being detained.

Worse, neither the academics on the purge list nor their students were allowed to protest peacefully. Their attempted protest on February 10 at the School of Political Sciences in Ankara met a huge police force and was crushed. In the brawl, the police attacked the crowd; many in it were injured, manhandled, trapped in their robes and dragged along the ground.

One of the purged, Professor Yuksel Taskin, from an Istanbul department of journalism, tweeted: “This is a pure political ‘cleansing’. But my conscience is clear. Let my students know that I shall never, ever bow down!”

Professor Yuksel Taskin, who was recently purged from an Istanbul department of journalism, tweeted: “This is a pure political ‘cleansing’. But my conscience is clear. Let my students know that I shall never, ever bow down!” (Image source: Hakan YÜCEL video screenshot)

Emre Tansu Keten, from the same school, wrote: “I am simply proud to be in the same list along with my senior colleagues who are thrown out because of the opinion they expressed.”

Turkish journalist Yavuz Baydar commented:

“Widening more by each and every decree, this is now a country resembling Germany of 1930, which ended up chasing out its elite beyond its borders. What I know for certain, that there will no longer be any possibilities for our academicians ‘cleansed’ to find work and, live in decency and honor.”

Baydar is not the only person to feel that the situation in Turkey increasingly resembles Nazi Germany. Melih Kirlidog, a Turkish scholar specializing in internet censorship and surveillance, said: “It resembles the atmosphere of 1933 Germany to me.”

Similarly, prominent Turkish novelist Zulfu Livaneli, who was imprisoned several times during the 1971 coup in Turkey, thinks the comparison is justified: “Some [scholars] resist, some collaborate with the regime so as to continue their work, and some turn a blind eye in silence.”

After he came to power in November 2002, Erdogan promised to make Turkey a land of freedoms, devoid of the military’s tutelage. Since then, he has tamed the once-secular military establishment. Nevertheless, his Islamist “land of freedoms” vision has only been partially materialized: You have all the freedoms you want — so long as you are a pro-Erdogan Islamist.

Burak Bekdil, one of Turkey’s leading journalists, was just fired from Turkey’s leading newspaper after 29 years, for writing what was taking place in Turkey for Gatestone. He is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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.