Turkey’s ruling party on Friday ordered a purge from its ranks of supporters of US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, accused of plotting last month’s failed coup.
The “urgent clean-up in the party organisation” was aimed at expelling those linked with the Fethullah Terrorist Organisation — as Ankara calls the movement blamed for the July 15 attempted putsch, state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
It comes as Turkey announced a visit later this month from US Secretary of State John Kerry, which would be the first by a western diplomat since the failed effort to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.
Turkey’s hardline response to the coup has escalated tensions with Europe, while the United States, where Gulen has been in self-imposed exile since 1999, has not yet confirmed the key visit by its top diplomat.
Ankara has accused Erdogan’s arch-foe Gulen of running a “parallel state” and on Thursday issued a warrant for his arrest for “ordering the July 15 coup” — which the reclusive cleric vehemently denies.
The Muslim cleric has denounced the arrest warrant as meaningless.
– ‘Capital of radical racism’-
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu escalated a war of words with Austria on Friday, calling it the “capital of radical racism” after Vienna urged an end to Ankara’s EU membership talks.
“Racism is an enemy of human rights and humanitarian values and the Austrian chancellor should first look at his own country,” he told TGRT news channel.
“Austria is the capital of radical racism,” he added.
Reacting on Twitter soon after Cavusoglu made those comments, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz urged his counterpart to “exercise restraint”.
“Turkey needs to moderate its choice of words and actions,” he said.
Turkish authorities have implemented a relentless crackdown in the wake of the coup.
Over 60,000 people within the military, judiciary, civil service and education have been dismissed, detained or are currently under investigation for suspected links to the Gulen movement.
Cavusoglu also said US Secretary of State John Kerry would visit on August 24, but a US State Department spokesman told media: “We have no travel to announce.”
Turkey has frequently called on the United States to extradite Gulen, sending documents to Washington as evidence of his alleged involvement in the putsch attempt.
– Gulen suspects in Kazakhstan –
Turkey is also pressing Kazakhstan over its schools linked to Gulen, with Erdogan expressing the hope on Friday that the Central Asian country would take steps to close them.
“They (Gulenists) have 33 schools in Kazakhstan. We have delivered them the list,” Erdogan told reporters in Ankara with Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the first foreign head of state to visit Turkey after the failed coup.
The Kazakh leader said 90,000 students were registered in those schools and several thousand of them had been awarded in international competitions.
“If there are any among them linked with terrorism… we will respond to Turkey’s demand,” he said.
Ankara’s crackdown on the Gulen movement has also targeted journalists accused of links to the preacher.
Twelve out of 14 journalist suspects from the Zaman daily were remanded in custody, Anadolu reported on Friday, less than a week after six others were arrested.
Mumtazer Turkone, the former columnist for the newspaper, was one of the journalists arrested by an Istanbul court, on charges of “serving FETO’s purposes,” it added.
