Turkey marks second anniversary of coup attempt
Various ceremonies have been held in Turkey and throughout other countries abroad to commemorate the second anniversary of the coup attempt that took place in Turkey on July 15, 2016.
In Accra, the Turkish Embassy also marked the day, which was participated by Turkish citizens living in Ghana.
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The Turkish Ambassador to Ghana, Madam Nesrin Bayazit, told the Daily Graphic that since the failed coup attempt, it had been well established that the Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organisation’s (FETO) Leader, Fethullah Gulen, and his disciples had planned to capture the Turkish Republic by using lethal military force against innocent civilians.
She observed that FETO had established itself in around 160 countries, including Ghana, with thousands of schools and businesses.
The ambassador expressed the hope that their actions in Turkey would be considered a wake-up call for other countries.
She said two years of investigations and judicial process on the events of July 15 had produced countless crucial evidence.
“It has been established that even on the night of July 15, the plotters were in direct communication with the FETO leadership,” she stated.
“That night, they killed 251 of our citizens and wounded over 2,000 people,” the ambassador noted regrettably.
Education movement
Madam Bayazit noted that FETO started under the guise of a charitable education effort and emphasised that this organisation was trying the same tactics in many other countries by disguising themselves as a benign education movement like they started the campaign of establishing schools in Turkey and later followed the same path around the world.
The ambassador stressed that it was now clear that this was the first step of an infiltration campaign where children and their parents were recruited with the seemingly innocent promise of better education and good jobs.
These children were put through school with academic and financial help, she added.
They turned into unquestioning foot soldiers of Fethullah Gulen. They were provided with the answers to entrance examinations for prominent schools and later for prestigious government jobs.
In over 30 countries, FETO schools and other entities had been stopped from operating, put under state control or turned over to the Turkish Maarif Foundation, which actually paved the way for the shrinkage of the global crime apparatus of this organisation, the ambassador said.
Media houses
Ambassador Bayazit pointed out that the organisation established media houses to shape the public opinion for or against any person, group or idea, adding that many people in Turkey who saw the organisation for what it really was had been subjected to lynching through the activities of the media houses.
These media houses, she observed, also became focal points of action taken against journalists, academics, bureaucrats and military officers who opposed and or tried to expose them.
They were lynched and purged. As the organisation grew stronger and became more affluent, it started meddling in business transactions.
Laundering enormous sums of money, arranging illegal transfers of cash and other financial crimes became business as usual.
When the government of Turkey finally understood what was actually happening, the ambassador said, FETO had started taking drastic and extreme actions, with the first wave of those actions coming in December 2013 where the organisation released a number of so-called recordings and fabricated material.
That inconclusive attack had provided the wake-up call both to the government and to the public and following the discovery of the secret communication system (ByLock, Eagle and Tango) and interception of instructions, their moves were countered and the extent of the infiltration and the infection it caused was discovered.
July 15 happened at a time when the Turkish Armed Forces had discovered and listed most of the so-called military personnel who were actually recruits of the organisation and was getting ready to expel them.
It was a desperate need to keep their control in place and capture the state, which they were aiming to do through infiltration.
“This definitely was not an ordinary coup attempt.
In previous coup attempts putschists neither opened fire on civilians nor bombed the Parliament, the presidential compound or the police headquarters,” the ambassador stated.
